KUAC-TV (channel 9) is a

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member

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, United States. Owned by the

University of Alaska Fairbanks The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF or Alaska) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-, National Sea Grant College Program, sea-, and National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program, space-grant research university in ...

, it is

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member station KUAC (89.9 FM). The two outlets share studios in the Great Hall on the UAF campus; KUAC-TV's transmitter is located on Bender Mountain. KUAC-TV is the only PBS station in Alaska that is not part of Alaska Public Television, which was established on July 1, 2012.

History

KUAC-TV signed on for the first time on December 22, 1971, as an early

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present to the Interior. It was the first public television station in Alaska, and the only one until

KAKM KAKM (channel 7) is a PBS member television station in Anchorage, Alaska, United States. Owned by Alaska Public Media, it is sister to NPR member KSKA (91.1 FM). The two stations share studios at the Elmo Sackett Broadcast Center on the campus ...

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signed on in 1975. It originally aired for only five hours a day, from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. As the difficulties associated with bringing PBS programming decreased, channel 9 increased its schedule, and now operates 24 hours a day. In 1995, KUAC-TV joined with KTOO-TV in

Juneau Juneau ( ; ), officially the City and Borough of Juneau, is the capital of the U.S. state of Alaska, located along the Gastineau Channel and the Alaskan panhandle. Juneau was named the capital of Alaska in 1906, when the government of wha ...

and KYUK-TV in

Bethel Bethel (, "House of El" or "House of God",Bleeker and Widegren, 1988, p. 257. also transliterated ''Beth El'', ''Beth-El'', ''Beit El''; ; ) was an ancient Israelite city and sacred space that is frequently mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Bet ...

to form AlaskaOne, a network of PBS stations serving all of Alaska outside of Anchorage. The three stations formed the Alaska Public Broadcasting Service to air a common PBS schedule. This move was made in hopes of sharing administrative costs.Lean, Reba
AlaskaOne dissolving; KUAC TV taking over

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, June 16, 2012. KTOO and KYUK occasionally broke off from the AlaskaOne feed to air programming relevant to their areas, while KUAC-TV used its massive translator network to deliver AlaskaOne programming across the Interior. On November 18, 2011. the APBS board voted to transfer the operation of the AlaskaOne feed to Alaska Public Telecommunications, owner of Anchorage's PBS station, KAKM. In response, UAF, which cast the lone dissenting vote, announced on December 11 that KUAC-TV would break off from AlaskaOne and revert to being a separate locally-focused PBS station on July 1, 2012. UAF contended that a single statewide PBS service would not meet the needs of the Interior. On July 1, KUAC-TV resumed its original branding of "KUAC TV9," while KTOO and KYUK joined with KAKM to form

Alaska Public Media Alaska Public Media is an American non-profit organization in Alaska, with member television and radio stations that are part of PBS, NPR and other public broadcasting networks. Formerly known as Alaska Public Telecommunications, Inc., it relie ...

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's digital 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— ...

: In 2004, the station signed on the first high-definition public television service in Alaska.

Analog-to-digital conversion

KUAC-TV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 9, in April 2009. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition

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 24 to VHF channel 9.

References

External links

KUAC-FM-TV

YouTube
naugural broadcast of KUAC-TV on December 22, 1971, including introductory comments from University of Alaska president William Ransom Wood {{PBS Alaska 1971 establishments in Alaska Television channels and stations established in 1971 UAC-TV PBS member stations First Nations Experience affiliates