KASA-TV (channel 2), branded on-air as , 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 eart ...

licensed to Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States, serving the

Albuquerque Albuquerque ( ; ), ; kee, Arawageeki; tow, Vakêêke; zun, Alo:ke:k'ya; apj, Gołgéeki'yé. abbreviated ABQ, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of New Mexico. Its nicknames, The Duke City and Burque, both reference its founding in ...

area and most of the state as an owned-and-operated station of the Spanish-language

Telemundo Telemundo (; formerly NetSpan) is an American Spanish-language terrestrial television network owned by NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises, a division of NBCUniversal, which in turn is owned by Comcast. It provides content nationally with pr ...

network. KASA-TV's studios are located on Monroe Street NE in Albuquerque; its transmitter is located on Sandia Crest, with translators in much of the state and southwestern

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the wes ...

extending its signal. Channel 2 in Santa Fe was established in 1983 and struggled for its first decade on air as an independent station. It went silent in 1992 during a merger with KGSW-TV, which resulted in 1993 in its relaunch as Fox affiliate KASA-TV. KASA remained the Albuquerque market's Fox affiliate until a merger led to Fox's move to a subchannel of

KRQE KRQE (channel 13) is a television station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, affiliated with CBS and Fox. Owned by Nexstar Media Group, it is sister to Santa Fe–licensed ''de facto'' CW owned-and-operated station KWBQ (channel 19) a ...

; at that time, channel 2 and its translators were sold to Lubbock, Texas-based Ramar Communications and switched to Telemundo, which had previously aired on that company's KTEL-CD. Telemundo's parent company,

NBCUniversal NBCUniversal Media, LLC is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate corporation owned by Comcast and headquartered at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, United States. NBCUniversal is primaril ...

, purchased all of Ramar's stations in New Mexico in 2021.

History

Early years

The New Mexico Media Co., a group of Santa Fe businessmen, applied on September 10, 1977, for a new television station to serve Santa Fe on channel 11 (amended two months later to specify channel 2). Both the New Mexico Media application and the other channel 11 bid, which became KCHF, were contested by the Albuquerque television stations for specifying the use of Sandia Crest as the transmitter site, which they contended would have meant an insufficient signal over the city of license. The FCC approved the application on May 10, 1982. By that time, the application had been amended to change the transmitter site to No Name Peak in the Jemez Mountains. Channel 2 came to the air on October 31, 1983—a day later than announced, prompting the station to apologize on local radio stations and claim it was "a day late but not a single program short"—as independent station KSAF-TV. Based in a new studio building at the corner of St. Francis and St. Michael's Drive in Santa Fe, channel 2 promised a strong signal for Santa Fe and Albuquerque, as well as the first live newscast for New Mexico's capital city; the news programs were scrapped just three months after launch. In October 1984, a California-based investor group bought into KSAF-TV. The new ownership upgraded the programming by acquiring 600 films from a financially troubled

KNAT-TV KNAT-TV (channel 23) is a religious television station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, owned and operated by the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). The station's studios are located on Coors Boulevard in northwestern Albuquerque, and ...

; in order to avoid confusion with radio station KAFE and "KSFE-TV", a former cable channel in Santa Fe, the call letters were changed to KNMZ-TV (stylized as "KNM2") on March 1, 1985. The station filed for bankruptcy in August 1987, citing $11 million in assets but $15 million in liabilities. Coronado Communications Company, a subsidiary of the

Las Vegas Las Vegas (; Spanish for "The Meadows"), often known simply as Vegas, is the 25th-most populous city in the United States, the most populous city in the state of Nevada, and the county seat of Clark County. The city anchors the Las Vegas ...

-based Sunbelt Communications Company, purchased channel 2 for $3 million in early 1988. Founding investor John Pollon bought back the studio building, and KNMZ-TV moved its Santa Fe offices to smaller quarters on Calle Nava while shifting the bulk of operations to Albuquerque. Coronado also laid off 17 staffers to cut back to the "bare bones" necessary for operation. Coronado made its own repositioning of channel 2 in 1989, changing the call letters to KKTO-TV.

Merger with KGSW-TV and Fox era

By mid-1992, KKTO-TV was economically struggling: Coronado had lost $6.6 million in its ownership of the station, and it warned that it could not continue to operate KKTO-TV much longer. That July, the Providence Journal Company (ProJo)—owners of KGSW-TV (channel 14), New Mexico's Fox affiliate—reached a deal to purchase KKTO from Coronado. The deal was made with the express purpose of moving the Fox affiliation and channel 14 programming to the VHF station, which in turn would move its transmitter to Sandia Crest in a $1 million upgrade. ProJo immediately took control of KKTO under a local marketing agreement, firing its 18 staff and rehiring 10. Programming from KKTO ceased at midnight on September 6, 1992. That same week, the

Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. ne ...

news agency had sued the station for $78,700 in unpaid wire service bills. The FCC approved the ProJo purchase of KKTO in January 1993, along with new KASA-TV call letters for channel 2. On April 5, 1993, at 6 p.m., KGSW-TV signed off channel 14, and KASA-TV began telecasting on channel 2. In 1997, Belo acquired the Providence Journal Company. However, it found that there was no synergy between KASA-TV and its clusters of stations in Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and the mid-Atlantic states and put the station up for sale, along with

KHNL KHNL (channel 13) is a television station in Honolulu, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, serving the Hawaiian Islands as an affiliate of NBC. It is owned by Gray Television alongside CBS affiliate KGMB (channel 5) and Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, Kailua ...

Honolulu Honolulu (; ) is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, which is in the Pacific Ocean. It is an unincorporated county seat of the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, situated along the southeast coast of the island ...

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; haw, Hawaii or ) is a state in the Western United States, located in the Pacific Ocean about from the U.S. mainland. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only state ...

, in May 1999. The Albuquerque and Honolulu operations were purchased by

Raycom Media Raycom Media, Inc. was an American television broadcasting company based in Montgomery, Alabama. Raycom owned and/or provided services for 65 television stations and two radio stations across 44 markets in 20 states. Raycom, through its Communi ...

for $88 million. Under Raycom, KASA began airing a 9 p.m. local newscast produced for it by

KOB-TV KOB (channel 4) is a television station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by Hubbard Broadcasting, whose sister cable channel Reelz is also based in Albuquerque (KOB and Reelz, however, maintain separate ...

in November 2000. After Raycom purchased the

Liberty Corporation The Liberty Corporation was a media corporation originally based in Greenville, South Carolina. At its peak, Liberty owned 15 network-affiliated television stations across the Midwest and Southern regions of the United States. Cable advertising ...

in August 2005, Raycom announced its intent to sell KASA and several other stations. On July 27, 2006, Raycom announced that

LIN TV LIN Media was an American holding company founded in 1994 that operated 43 television stations. All except one were affiliates of the television in the United States#Major broadcast networks, six major U.S. television networks. One of the re ...

, owner of CBS affiliate

, would purchase KASA for $55 million and take over operations at the end of August. The creation of a television duopoly involving two " Big Four" affiliates—typically the four highest-rated stations in a market, which cannot be commonly owned—was allowed since KASA was New Mexico's fifth-rated station at the time. The deal also saw KASA move out of its Albuquerque studio site—which had been used by KGSW-TV since its start—to KRQE's facility and switch from airing a 9 p.m. newscast produced by KOB to one from KRQE.

The Telemundo era

While LIN was able to retain both KRQE and KASA in its merger with

Media General Media General was an American media company based in Richmond, Virginia. The company's origins can be traced back to 1887 when Richmond attorney Joseph Bryan acquired ''The Richmond Daily Times'', which later became ''The Richmond Times-Dispatch ...

in 2014, this would prove not to be the case in 2016 when Nexstar Broadcasting Group reached a deal to purchase Media General for $4.6 billion. As KASA and KRQE were both ranked among the top four stations in the market during the November 2015 sweeps, Nexstar elected to divest one of the two stations to comply with the FCC duopoly rules; on June 30, 2016, it agreed to sell KASA-TV and associated translators to Ramar Communications, owner of

affiliate KTEL-CD (channel 15), Movies! affiliate KUPT-LD (channel 16), and

MeTV MeTV, an acronym for Memorable Entertainment Television, is an American broadcast television network owned by Weigel Broadcasting. Marketed as "The Definitive Destination for Classic TV", the network airs a variety of classic television program ...

affiliate KRTN-LD (channel 33), for $2.5 million. On January 18, 2017, Fox programming moved to a subchannel of KRQE, as Ramar did not acquire the Fox affiliation in the transaction. KASA switched to Telemundo; Ramar also converted its three existing full-power stations in the market—KRTN-TV (channel 33) in Durango, Colorado, KTEL-TV (channel 25) in Carlsbad, and KUPT (channel 29) in Hobbs—into satellites of KASA. Ramar announced the sale of its entire Albuquerque market television operation—KASA-TV, the other three full-power stations, and all of their dependent translators—to

on July 30, 2021. The $12.5 million deal will give NBCU Telemundo stations in 31 markets and marks the end of 23 years of Ramar's ownership of the Telemundo affiliation in the city. The sale was completed on October 5.

Newscasts

Initially, local news on Telemundo Nuevo México originated from the studios of KJTV-TV, formerly owned by Ramar, in Lubbock, Texas, with reports from Albuquerque-based reporters. As part of the sale, NBC entered into a transitional services agreement with Gray Television, which had purchased KJTV-TV and other Ramar television assets in Lubbock earlier in 2021, to continue news production in the short term; in announcing the purchase, NBC declared its intention to start its own local news service for KASA. On October 18, 2021, Albuquerque's NBC affiliate, KOB, assumed production of the local newscasts.

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 - a ...

. The use of major channel numbers 15, 29, and 33 for the other subchannels correlates to the other full-power ex-Ramar stations in New Mexico. Additionally, TeleXitos is carried as channel 2.2 of KRTN-LD.

Analog-to-digital conversion

KASA-TV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 2, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television 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 27.

Translators

Unusually for a Spanish-language television station, KASA-TV has a translator network comparable to those of the major English-language stations in Albuquerque, with 22 rebroadcasters in New Mexico and Colorado. In early 1987, KGSW-TV began building translators in such cities as Alamosa, Durango, and Farmington. Around the same time, the then-KNMZ-TV built its first rebroadcaster, to serve Farmington. * Alamogordo: K27HP-D * Artesia: K16LR-D *

Aztec The Aztecs () were a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl ...

: K27ND-D * Caballo: K31DR-D * Carlsbad: K17MN-D * Deming: K15IG-D * Eagle Nest: K31NZ-D *

Farmington Farmington may refer to: Places Canada *Farmington, British Columbia * Farmington, Nova Scotia (disambiguation) United States *Farmington, Arkansas *Farmington, California *Farmington, Connecticut *Farmington, Delaware * Farmington, Georgia * ...

: K23KL-D * Gallup: K18HF-D * Hobbs: K27GL-D *

: K20GQ-D * Roswell: K15FT-D * Ruidoso: K28PS-D * Santa Fe: K31NB-D * Silver City: K25DI-D * Taos: K12OG-D *

Truth or Consequences ''Truth or Consequences'' is an American game show originally hosted on NBC radio by Ralph Edwards (1940–1957) and later on television by Edwards (1950–1954), Jack Bailey (1954–1956), Bob Barker (1956–1975), Steve Dunne (1957–1958), ...

: K22JY-D * Bayfield, CO: K19LD-D *

Cortez, CO Cortez () is a List of municipalities in Colorado#Home rule municipality, home rule municipality that is the county seat and the List of municipalities in Colorado, most populous municipality of Montezuma County, Colorado, Montezuma County, Color ...

: K07UY-D, K27IG-D * Durango, CO: KXZQ-LD 35 * Pagosa Springs, CO: K19LC-D

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kasa-Tv Hispanic and Latino American culture in Albuquerque, New Mexico ASA-TV Telemundo Station Group Telemundo network affiliates Television channels and stations established in 1983 1983 establishments in New Mexico Cozi TV affiliates