It's been a long time since Blasterz have seen a commercial TV broadcast antenna with batwings - which is why this tower caught our eye as we explored downtown Fairbanks, AK.
This red-and-white striped tower on top of the Lathrop Building in downtown Fairbanks is the historic KFAR-TV Channel 2 broadcast antenna. KFAR-TV signed on at noon on 1 March 1955, becoming the second TV station in Fairbanks. (KTVF-TV channel 11 went on the air in late February, so KATN missed making Alaska TV history by about a week.)
In 1955 KFAR-TV broadcast its signal from its studios on 2nd Street in the Lathrop building - where the station (renamed KATN-TV in 1984) remains today.
This batwing-antenna is no longer energized to broadcast the KATN signal. Instead, this nearly 70-year-old tower hosts the station's modern-era studio-transmitter link to its much newer transmitter tower on Cranberry Ridge.
From Wikipedia: (
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"KATN, virtual channel 2 (UHF digital channel 18), is an ABC/Fox/CW+-affiliated television station licensed to Fairbanks, Alaska, United States. Owned by Raleigh, North Carolina–based Vision Alaska LLC, the station is operated through a time brokerage agreement (TBA) by Coastal Television Broadcasting Company, LLC. KATN's studios are located in the Lathrop Building on 2nd Avenue in downtown Fairbanks, and its transmitter is located on Cranberry Ridge northeast of the city.
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 1985, when the owners of KIMO (now KYUR) in Anchorage bought the station, changed the call letters (the ATN in KATN stood for Alaska Television Network, a consortium of KATN, KIMO, and KJUD in Juneau), and made KATN the primary ABC affiliate. The station continued carrying NBC programs as a secondary affiliate until KTVF switched from CBS to NBC in 1996, 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 (via The CW Plus) on its digital subchannel. The subchannel is called Fairbanks CW and uses the fictional call letters KWFA (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 KJUD.
On October 30, 2017, Fox announced that it would move its Fairbanks affiliation from KFXF-LD (channel 22) to a subchannel of KATN on November 4.
Conversion to digital signal
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."
Visit Instructions:In your log, you should include a picture of yourself, or if alone, a picture with the GPSr in the shot is acceptable.
Please relate your experience at the location, or any stories you may have that relates to that station (e.g. you appeared as a child in a local program, you were interviewed on-camera for a news story, etc.).
Pictures with you and the local news personalities or celebrities get you extra credit!