KATN


KATN is a television station in Fairbanks, Alaska, United States, affiliated with ABC, Fox, and The CW Plus. Owned by Vision Alaska LLC, the station is operated through a time brokerage agreement 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.
WWW Official Site

History

KATN debuted on March 1, 1955, as KFAR-TV, and was Fairbanks' second television station after KTVF. It became KTTU-TV on June 18, 1981, and KATN on August 18, 1984. It was the first television station in Fairbanks to broadcast in color in 1967.
KFAR/KTTU was primarily an NBC station with ABC as the secondary network until 1985, when the owners of KIMO in Anchorage bought the station, changed the call letters, 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 on its digital subchannel. The subchannel is called "Fairbanks CW" and uses the fictional call letters KWFA.
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 to a subchannel of KATN on November 4.
In 2022, the station and its sisters outsourced their news programming to News Hub, which had recently been acquired by Coastal Television, as Your Alaska Link News.

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's signal is multiplexed:
ChannelVideoAspectShort nameProgramming
2.1720p16:9ABCABC
2.2720p16:9FOXFox
2.3480i16:9CWThe CW Plus
2.4480i16:9IONIon
2.5480i4:3MYSTERYIon Mystery
2.6480i16:9GritGrit
2.7480i16:9CourtTVCourt TV
2.8480i16:9DablDabl

Conversion to digital signal

KATN shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 2, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States Digital television transition 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, using virtual channel 2.