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KHET, branded as PBS Hawai'i, is a PBS member television station located in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States. The station is owned by the Hawaii Public Television Foundation, which is governed by a volunteer Board of Directors. For almost 50 years, PBS Hawai'i was located on Dole Street on the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu. In 2016, PBS Hawai'i moved to its current location at 315 Sand Island Access Road, in a renovated and expanded facility and former site of KFVE and KHNL. PBS Hawai'i's Oahu transmitter is located on Palehua Ridge, north of Makakilo.
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The station's signal is relayed across the rest of the state outside of Oahu and metropolitan Honolulu on full-powered KMEB (VHF channel 10) in Wailuku on Maui and through a network of low-powered translators on the other Hawaiian Islands. It can also be seen statewide on Oceanic Time Warner Cable analog channel 11 (10 on Oahu) and HD digital 1010, and Hawaiian Telcom channels 11 and HD digital 1011.
Station history
KHET signed on the air for the first time on April 15, 1966; KMEB followed on six months later on September 22 of that year. KHET is the second outlet in Honolulu to occupy the channel 11 dial position, the first being KONA-TV from 1952 to 1955, when it moved to channel 2 because the higher VHFs (2 to 6) offered more ERPs at the time; that station is now KHON-TV. Had KONA not moved to channel 2, the channel would've remained a commercial allocation, as the FCC had intended to make channel 7 a non-commercial allocation for Honolulu in the first assignment, but the FCC relocated channel 7 to Wailuku in 1959 and made channel 11 a non-commercial allocation instead. Originally known on-air as "Hawaii Educational Television" (or "Hawaii ETV"), it rebranded as "Hawaii Public Television" in 1970 and then became "PBS Hawaii" in 2003. PBS Hawaii broadcasts 24 hours a day on cable television, but airs only from 5 a.m. to 12 a.m. daily on its over-the-air broadcast signal; this makes it one of the few remaining television stations in the United States that continues to sign off during the overnight hours.
Digital channels
The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
Analog-to-digital conversion
Both stations discontinued regular programming on their analog signals, respectively on January 15, 2009, the date in which full-power television stations in Hawai'i transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts (six months earlier than the June 12 transition date for stations on the U.S. mainland):
The station's digital transmitter operates at 9.5 kW (versus 148 kW for its analog signal).
Translators
PBS Hawai'i operates the following low-powered translator stations: