Subchannels 2.1 ABC
2.2 CW | ||
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Branding KATN ABC 2 (general)
ABC Alaska News (newscasts) Slogan Alaska's Superstation
Your Alaska Link Channels Digital: 18 (UHF)
Virtual: 2 (PSIP) Affiliations ABC (secondary until 1985) Owner Vision Alaska LLC
(Vision Alaska II LLC) | ||
KATN, virtual channel 2 (digital channel 18), is an ABC-affiliated television station located in Fairbanks, Alaska, United States. Owned by Vision Alaska, KATN is operated through a Time Brokerage agreement by Coastal Television Broadcasting Company, LLC. KATN studios are located in the Lathrop Building on 2nd Avenue in downtown Fairbanks and the transmitter tower is northeast of the city on Cranberry Ridge.
Contents
History
KATN debuted on March 1, 1955 as KFAR-TV, and was Fairbanks' second television station after KTVF. It became KTTU-TV (no relation to the present-day Tucson, Arizona station) on June 18, 1981 and KATN on August 18, 1984. It is now a part of the ABC Alaska Superstation and was the first TV station in Fairbanks to broadcast in color in 1967 (while KTVF was temporarily off the air due to a flood).
KFAR/KTTU was primarily an NBC station with ABC as the secondary network until 1984, when the owners of KIMO (now KYUR) bought the station, changed the call letters (the ATN in KATN stood for Alaska Television Network, a consortium of KATN, KIMO, and KJUD), and made them the primary ABC affiliate. KATN would continue to carry NBC programs as a secondary affiliate until 1996 when KTVF flipped from CBS to NBC in response to KATN's new ownership. Until the launch of KFXF in 1992, they were Fairbanks' only two commercial network stations.
In September 2006, KATN began to show programming from The CW Television Network on its digital subchannel. The subchannel is called Fairbanks CW and uses the fictional call letters KWFA-DT (the actual call letters of the subchannel are still KATN).
Smith Media sold KATN and the remainder of the "ABC Alaska's Superstation" system to Vision Alaska LLC in 2010. When the sale was completed, on May 13, 2010, Coastal Television Broadcasting Company, LLC entered into a Time Brokerage agreement with Vision Alaska to operate KATN and sister station in Juneau KJUD.
Digital channels
The station's digital channel is multiplexed:
Analog-to-digital conversion
KATN shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 2, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 18. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former VHF analog channel 2.