KPMR (channel 38) is a

television station A television station is a set of equipment managed by a business, organisation or other entity such as an amateur television (ATV) operator, that transmits video content and audio content via radio waves directly from a transmitter on the earth's s ...

licensed to

Santa Barbara, California Santa Barbara (, meaning ) is a coastal city in Santa Barbara County, California, of which it is also the county seat. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coast of the United States excepting A ...

, United States, serving the

Central Coast of California The Central Coast is an area of California, roughly spanning the coastal region between Point Mugu and Monterey Bay. It lies northwest of Los Angeles and south of the San Francisco Bay Area, and includes the rugged, rural, and sparsely populat ...

as an affiliate of the Spanish-language network

Univision Univision () is an American Spanish-language terrestrial television, free-to-air television network owned by TelevisaUnivision. It is the United States' largest provider of Spanish-language content. The network's programming is aimed at the L ...

. It is owned by

Entravision Communications Entravision Communications Corporation is an American media company based in Santa Monica, California. Entravision primarily caters to the Spanish language in the United States, Spanish-speaking Hispanic and Latino Americans, Hispanic community ...

alongside Santa Maria–licensed

UniMás UniMás (, stylized as ''UNIMÁS'', and originally known as TeleFutura from its launch on January 14, 2002, to January 6, 2013) is an American Spanish-language terrestrial television, free-to-air television network owned by TelevisaUnivision. ...

affiliate KTSB-CD (channel 35). The two stations share studios on Fairway Drive in Santa Maria north of

Santa Maria Public Airport Santa Maria Public Airport (Capt. G. Allan Hancock Field) is three miles (5 km) south of Santa Maria, in northern Santa Barbara County, California, United States. History The airport was built by the United States Army during World War ...

; KPMR's transmitter is located atop Broadcast Peak, between Santa Barbara and

Santa Ynez Santa Ynez ( ; Spanish for "St. Agnes", originally spelled ''Santa Inés'') is an unincorporated community in the Santa Ynez Valley of Santa Barbara County, California, United States. The population was 4,505 at the 2020 census, up from 4,418 a ...

in the

Santa Ynez Mountains The Santa Ynez Mountains are a portion of the Transverse Ranges, part of the Pacific Coast Ranges of the west coast of North America. It is the westernmost range in the Transverse Ranges. The range is a large fault block of Cenozoic age created ...

History

On May 23, 1997, the

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, internet, wi-fi, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains j ...

(FCC) granted a

construction permit Planning permission or building permit refers to the approval needed for construction or expansion (including significant renovation), and sometimes for demolition, in some jurisdictions. House building permits, for example, are subject to bu ...

to Coast TV to build a full-service television station on channel 38 to serve Santa Barbara and California's Central Coast. Originally identified by its application identification, "840720 kg", the station took call letters KPMR in February 1998. Entravision Communications acquired the station from Coast TV in a deal finalized in January 2001, and applied for a license for the station a month later, bringing the station on the air under

program test authority In broadcasting, program test authority (PTA) is an authorization to conduct on-air testing of broadcast station facilities authorized to be built under a construction permit. Once this testing is successfully completed, and all measured paramet ...

as a Univision affiliate. The FCC granted the license on April 12, 2002. On June 15, 2015, the studios of KPMR and KTSB-CA were broken into by former station employee Pablo Quiroz Jr., destroying computers, cars, windows, and hard drives. He also documented his vandalism on

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

during the spree.

Programming

KPMR airs Spanish-language programming such as

telenovela A telenovela is a type of a television serial drama or soap opera produced primarily in Latin America. The word combines ''tele'' (for "television") and ''novela'' (meaning "novel"). Similar Drama (film and television), drama genres around the w ...

s, comedies,

movies A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, since ...

, sports and news, as well as Univision network programming. Local programming includes a newscast originally called , and recently rebranded as , which airs nightly at 6 and 11 p.m. Competing news stations in the area announced that KPMR's news department would be shut down on December 30, 2011; however, the station continues to air local newscasts. The station also continues to operate as a Univision affiliate.

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's signal is

multiplexed In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource— ...

: The FCC granted KPMR a construction permit in March 2001 to build companion digital facilities to broadcast on channel 21 with 1000 kW ERP. After two extensions of the construction permit, the station applied for and was granted Special Temporary Authority (STA) to build reduced-power facilities in October 2003. After several extensions of the STA, KPMR-DT applied for a license for its full-power digital facilities in July 2006. The station has elected to remain on channel 21 after the end of the DTV transition.

Analog-to-digital conversion

KPMR shut down its analog signal, over

UHF Ultra high frequency (UHF) is the ITU designation for radio frequencies in the range between 300 megahertz (MHz) and 3 gigahertz (GHz), also known as the decimetre band as the wavelengths range from one meter to one tenth of a meter ...

channel 38, on February 17, 2009, the original target date on which full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 21, using

virtual channel In most telecommunications organizations, a virtual channel is a method of remapping the ''program number'' as used in H.222 Program Association Tables and Program Mapping Tables to a channel number that can be entered as digits on a receiver's ...

38. KPMR also broadcasts sister station KTSB-CD as a

digital subchannel In broadcasting, digital subchannels are a method of transmitting more than one independent program stream simultaneously from the same digital radio or television station on the same radio frequency channel. This is done by using data compress ...

References

External links

* ** {{Entravision Communications 2001 establishments in California Comet (TV network) affiliates Entravision Communications stations Grit (TV network) affiliates Ion Television affiliates PMR Television channels and stations established in 2001 PMR