on november 5, 2019, whio-tv's over-the-air (ota) signal became unavailable to much of the market after, according to the station, defects in its new transmitter resulted in electric arcs, burning the old transmission line. according to the station, the need to inspect, repair and/or replace over of transmission line, coupled with inclement weather and a shortage of tower repair crews due to the then-recent spectrum reallocation repack, delayed the repair process. the outage affected ota reception of all subchannels and reception of subchannel 7.1 (cbs) for all satellite television viewers who subscribed to local channel packages, as the satellite providers rebroadcast whio-tv's ota signal of subchannel 7.1. a few days into the outage, with the consent of whio-tv, directv replaced the station at first with wcbs-tv from new york city, then with wkrc-tv from cincinnati; dish network replaced the station with woio from cleveland. customers using cable or streaming television services were still able to view whio-tv programming. on november 15, per an agreement with greater dayton public television, owner of pbs member wptd (channel 16), whio-tv requested special temporary authority from the fcc to transmit its main (cbs) subchannel over subchannel 16.2, displacing wptd's "16 again" service. on november 18, wptd subchannel 16.2 began broadcasting whio-tv programming ota, and this feed was also picked up by directv and dish network. the resolution on 16.2 was in 480i standard definition, compared to channel 7.1's 1080i high definition and the signal also lacked closed captioning; on the first day of broadcast, most of the audio feed was missing, but this was subsequently corrected; subchannels 7.2 (metv) and 7.3 (laff) remained unavailable to ota viewers. on november 21, 2019, whio-tv announced its signal was once again available for ota viewers; directv and dish network restored whio-tv's signal from subchannel 7.1 and wptd returned to normal content on subchannel 16.2. once whio-tv's digital broadcast was restored, many ota viewers had to rescan their tuners to pick up the station's signal since they would have already rescanned for wdtn's november 8 move.