WDCO-CD, virtual channel 10 (UHF digital channel 24), is a low-powered, Class A TBD owned-and-operated television station licensed to Woodstock, Virginia, United States and serving the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Owned by the Hunt Valley, Maryland-based Sinclair Broadcast Group, it is sister to Washington-licensed ABC affiliate WJLA-TV (channel 7) and local cable channel WJLA 24/7 News. WDCO-CD's transmitter is located in Ward Circle in Washington's northwest quadrant.
Co-owned and co-located WIAV-CD, virtual channel 58 (UHF digital channel 30), licensed to Washington, relays WDCO-CD's TBD programming in the new ATSC 3.0 broadcasting standard.
History
The station has operated since September 30, 1985, when it was put on the air as a religious independent station by Ruarch Associates, LLC (its original calls were W10AZ, with the WAZT calls, introduced in 1994, apparently being derived from it), and once had a radio sister station, WAZR (93.7 FM; that station is now owned by iHeartMedia with a contemporary format).
The WAZT network offered some programming from Cornerstone and other religious networks, but it generally did not show them in-pattern with those networks, and it also broadcast some secular syndicated programming and classic television shows.
WAZT once broadcast a local newscast at 5:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Monday through Friday (entitled News 10), but this was discontinued on December 26, 2005. In January 2006, WAZT began airing CBN's NewsWatch program.
Ruarch sold WAZT to JLA Media & Publications (no relation to WJLA-TV) in 2006. Jones Broadcasting acquired the station out of Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2011.
Jones Broadcasting sold the group of stations to Venture Technologies Group in December 2013. Venture immediately began moving WAZT and its sister stations to the far larger Washington, D.C. television market. At the time, WAZT transmitted from a hill near Toms Brook, Virginia. After agreeing to purchase the WAZT network, Venture obtained a construction permit to move the station's analog signal to the WZRV tower near Front Royal, Virginia. Later in 2014, it filed for a digital signal at a new transmitter site near The Plains, Virginia, which signed on in March 2015. Venture also purchased Washington-based WIAV-CD in 2014, which expanded the network's footprint into the city proper.
After spending most of its time as a religious broadcaster branded as simply "WAZT", the station and its relays changed to the branding "Faith Television Network" under Venture's ownership.
WAZT-CD's callsign was changed to WDCO-CD on October 11, 2017. On the same day, Winchester repeater WAZW-CD became WAZT-CD. On January 24, 2018, Faith Television Network announced it would cease broadcasting. All four remaining stations in the network became full-time affiliates of Jewelry Television on January 31.
As a result of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s 2016–17 spectrum reallocation incentive auction, channels 24 and 30 – occupied by WNVC and WNVT, respectively – became available in the Washington market in 2018. WDCO-CD applied to take over WNVC's channel 24 facilities at its tower in Merrifield, Virginia, which would place it firmly in the Washington market, while WIAV-CD applied to move to channel 30. After WNVC was unable to find a channel-sharing partner and went off the air, it sold the tower and transmitter building. Left without a transmission site, WDCO-CD moved to temporary low-powered facilities shared with WIAV-CD at the WRC-TV (channel 4) tower in northwest Washington, and reapplied to permanently build there.
The new WAZT-CD later relocated from Winchester to Blue Ridge Mountain in extreme southern Jefferson County, West Virginia, near the Virginia–West Virginia state line but also within the Washington market. After an additional "hop" to a tower in Leesburg, Virginia, this license was also moved into Washington proper and sold to Weigel Broadcasting, who operates it as WDME-CD.
On June 25, 2020, Venture Technologies Group filed an agreement with the FCC to sell WDCO-CD and WIAV-CD to Sinclair Broadcast Group for $8.5 million. The sale was completed on October 15, making them Sinclair's second and third properties in the Washington market, alongside WJLA-TV. On the same day, WDCO-CD and WIAV-CD flipped to Sinclair's TBD multicast network, simulcasting WJLA-TV's fourth digital subchannel in 1080i full high definition. WAZT-CD was not included in the sale and continues to air Jewelry TV programming.