The studios for KSAT-DT are located along N St Mary's Street near the San Antonio Museum of Art. This waymarked tower is a studio-transmitter link and a backup transmitter for their primary transmitter which is located 17 miles southeast of downtown San Antonio on a tower farm along Tower Road at the US 181.
From Wikipedia: (
visit link)
"KSAT-TV, virtual and VHF digital channel 12, is an ABC-affiliated television station licensed to San Antonio, Texas, United States. The station is owned by the Graham Media Group subsidiary of Graham Holdings Company. KSAT maintains studio facilities located on North St. Mary's Street on the northern edge of downtown, and its transmitter is located off Route 181 in northwest Wilson County (northeast of Elmendorf). On cable, the station is available on Charter Spectrum channel 13, and Grande Communications and AT&T U-verse channel 12.
The station first signed on the air on January 21, 1957, as KONO-TV; it was founded by the Roth family, owners of KONO radio (860 AM and 101.1 FM). Channel 12 has been an ABC affiliate since its debut, taking the affiliation from WOAI-TV (channel 4) and KENS (channel 5), which each carried select programs from the network on a secondary basis (WOAI began carrying ABC programming when it signed on in December 1949, followed by KENS, when it signed on two months later in February 1950); from 1956 to 1961, it was also an affiliate of the NTA Film Network. The station originally operated from studio facilities located at 1408 North St. Mary's Street in downtown San Antonio.
KSAT-TV's former studio facility on North St. Mary's Street.
The Roths sold channel 12 to Providence, Rhode Island-based The Outlet Company in 1968 (the Roths later sold the KONO radio stations to Duffy Broadcasting in 1985, both stations are now owned by Cox Radio); the following year, in 1969, the station changed its call letters to KSAT-TV (in reference to the station's city of license). Outlet was taken private in 1986 and the company's new owners sold KSAT to H&C Communications. In 1994, H&C sold KSAT and Houston sister station KPRC-TV to The Washington Post Company (now Graham Holdings Company), which placed the two stations within its Post-Newsweek Stations subsidiary.
In the early 2000s, Post-Newsweek adopted a unified "Local" brand for most of its television stations. KSAT briefly rebranded as "Local 12" in 2004, before reverting to the station's previous branding of "KSAT 12" (the call letters are pronounced syllabically as "K-Sat"). Although the station does not follow this brand standardization, the "Local" wording is periodically visible in the logo bug seen during the station's newscasts, which cycle between both brands (mimicking a similar behavior used by sister stations KPRC-TV and WDIV-TV in Detroit, whose logo bugs cycle between the station's call letters and channel number and their respective on-air brands "Local 4" or "Local 2").
In March 2014, KSAT relocated from its longtime St. Mary's Street studios to a new, state-of-the-art two-story facility that was built in an area that was formerly part of the station's parking lot. The building houses a large newsroom, numerous offices and meeting spaces, a convenience store-style breakroom for staff and a courtyard with outdoor seating as well as a grill and garden area. Demolition began on the former KSAT studio building shortly after the station relocated; by May 2014, that space will be transformed into a new parking lot for station employees and news vehicles.
The 2000 comedy film Miss Congeniality, which was set around a beauty pageant being held in San Antonio, used KSAT live trucks and microphones with the station's mic flags in a fictional sense; though none of KSAT's actual staff appeared during the film, instead using actors playing a KSAT reporter and a news photographer in a scene in which the film's lead character, FBI agent Gracie Hart (played by Sandra Bullock), is interviewed at The Alamo.
The station's digital channel is multiplexed:
KSAT was proposed to become a charter station of digital multicast service .2 Network; that network never launched, most of its programming rights have been acquired by other subchannel networks including Antenna TV and MeTV. In 2010, the station began carrying the Spanish language network LATV on digital subchannel 12.2. On April 2, 2012, KSAT replaced LATV with the classic television service MeTV, which is also available on local cable systems in the market.
Analog-to-digital conversion
KSAT-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over VHF channel 12, 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 relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 48 to VHF channel 12 for post-transition operations."
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!