besides serving its immediate area, wrex attracted viewers early on in its history from parts of the neighboring madison area. in fact, the two areas still share overlapping coverage among their television stations, especially in rock county, wisconsin (technically in the madison television market), and that market's abc affiliate, wkow (channel 27) is a sister station to wrex, assisting with newsgathering in the northern part of the rockford market. until madison's wisc-tv (channel 3) signed on in 1956, wrex was the only vhf station for both the rockford and madison areas. this was because rockford and madison were sandwiched between markets where other vhf channels were already assigned–chicago (channels 2, 5, 7, 9, and 11) to the east, milwaukee (channels 4, 6, 10, and 12) to the northeast, and la crosse/eau claire (channels 8 and 13) to the west.