City Waimānalo, Hawai'i | Branding KUPU 15 | |
Channels Digital: 15 (UHF)
Virtual: 15 (PSIP) Affiliations Religious Independent (2012–present) Owner Hawaii Catholic TV, Inc. First air date October 1, 2003; 13 years ago (2003-10-01) | ||
KUPU, UHF digital channel 15, is a religious independent television station serving Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, that is licensed to Waimanalo, Hawaii. The station is owned by Hawaii Catholic TV. KUPU's studios are located on Waimanu Street in downtown Honolulu, and its two transmitter sites are located near Waimanalo Beach and at Mauna Kapu at the top of the Waianae mountain range. As of October 2013, KUPU was added to Oceanic Time Warner Cable's digital line up, airing on channel 56. It is carried on channel 15 on Hawaiian Telcom's cable system and on DirecTV on channel 56
Contents
History
The Federal Communications Commission issued a construction permit to Waimanalo Television Partners on October 17, 2000, to build a full-service television station on UHF channel 56. The new station was given the call letters KMGT. The station began operating on October 1, 2003, under a Program Test Authority and was officially licensed on June 18, 2004. In September 2006, Oceania Christian Church bought the station from Waimanalo Television Partners and the following month, changed the station's call letters from KMGT to KUPU, derived from the Hawaiian word for "to sprout".
Analog-to-digital conversion
Because it was granted an original construction permit after the FCC finalized the DTV allotment plan on April 21, 1997 [1], the station did not receive a companion channel for a digital television signal. On January 15, 2009, KUPU shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 15, on January 15, 2009, the date in which full-power television stations in Hawaii transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts (six months earlier than the June 12 transition date for stations on the U.S. mainland).
The station flash-cut its digital signal into operation on UHF channel 15; its former analog channel 56 was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use and auctioned by the U.S. government for other uses as a result of the transition, using PSIP to display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 56; although stations are required to use a PSIP virtual channel that corresponds with their analog channel allocation, KUPU later remapped to virtual channel 15, matching its physical digital signal.
Programming
The station airs both locally produced and nationally syndicated Catholic-oriented religious programming from CatholicTV, as well as programming from Vatican TV. The programs serve Hawaii's 345,000 registered Catholics, as well as reaching out throughout the State of Hawaii to all communities. Programming is produced locally in English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Samoan, Tongan, Vietnamese and several other languages.