KFTU
KFTU-DT (channel 3) is a Spanish-language television station licensed to Douglas, Arizona, in the United States, serving as the Tucson market's outlet for the UniMás network. It is owned and operated by TelevisaUnivision, through the UniMas Partnership of Douglas, alongside Green Valley-licensed Univision outlet KUVE-DT (channel 46). The two stations share studios on Forbes Boulevard in Tucson, while KFTU's transmitter is located on Juniper Flats Road northwest of Bisbee. The station brands itself as UniMás Arizona. KFTU's structure is one of the more intricate in Arizona broadcasting: a full-power station licensed to a small border city in Cochise County, whose signal falls well short of the Tucson metropolitan area it exists to serve, it reaches its audience through a Class A repeater in Tucson itself, through a subchannel of its sister station, and through a reciprocal arrangement under which the sister station is carried on KFTU's own second subchannel.
Licensed to Douglas, Built for Tucson
Douglas is a city on the United States–Mexico border in southeastern Arizona, across the line from Agua Prieta, Sonora. It is far from Tucson, the market's population centre, and a channel 3 signal from the Douglas area cannot cover Tucson properly. KFTU exists in this configuration because of the way its licence was created: a construction permit for a new full-power station at Douglas that a succession of owners developed in the late 1990s. The station's purpose from the moment Univision acquired it was to bring the company's second network to the Tucson market, using the Douglas licence as the full-power anchor and low-power facilities in Tucson itself to complete the coverage. Understanding KFTU therefore means understanding two intertwined facilities: the Douglas full-power station and KFTU-CD, the Tucson Class A station that most Tucson viewers actually watch.
Construction Permit and the KBGF Period
The station was granted its original construction permit on April 8, 1998, and took the call letters KBGF in June 1998. It was initially owned by Winstar Broadcasting Corp. of New York City. In December 1999, Winstar sold the unbuilt station to Douglas Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Equity Broadcasting of Little Rock, Arkansas. Douglas Broadcasting completed construction of the station and filed for a licence to cover the construction permit in April 2001. At the same time, it brought KBGF on the air under Program Test Authority as an independent station; the station's first air date is recorded as June 20, 2001. Program Test Authority allowed the station to broadcast while its full licence application was pending, and KFTU would in fact operate in that provisional state for an unusually long time — nearly three years — before its licence to cover construction was granted on February 4, 2004.
Acquisition by Univision and the Telefutura Launch
In October 2001, only months after the station had gone on the air as an independent, Douglas Broadcasting sold it to Univision. The timing was deliberate. Univision was preparing to launch a second broadcast network, Telefutura, aimed at Spanish-speaking viewers with a mix of programming distinct from the main Univision service, and it was acquiring stations across the country to carry it. In January 2002, coinciding with Telefutura's launch, the station's call letters were changed to KFTU — the letters reflect TeleFutura and Tucson — and channel 3 became a charter outlet of the new network. A -TV suffix was added to the call sign two years later, in 2004; after the end of analogue broadcasting in June 2009, KFTU, like the other Univision-owned stations, switched to the -DT suffix it uses today. Telefutura was renamed UniMás in January 2013, and KFTU's affiliation continued under the new name, making the station's network relationship continuous from the network's first day of operation.
KFTU-CD: The Tucson Repeater
Because the Douglas signal falls well short of Tucson, KFTU's service to the city depends on KFTU-CD (channel 34), a low-power Class A station licensed to Tucson that rebroadcasts KFTU-DT. Its history is older than the parent station's. It began with a construction permit granted in August 1991 for a low-power station on UHF channel 25; delays caused the permit to lapse and the original call sign to be deleted in 1993, but the station was restored and came on the air in August 1994. In December 1996 its call sign became KTAZ-LP, for Tucson, Arizona. Venture Technologies sold the station to Douglas Broadcasting in April 2001, and Douglas in turn sold it to Univision that September — the same corporate sequence as the Douglas station itself. When Telefutura launched in January 2002, Univision dropped the station's Home Shopping Network affiliation in favour of the new network. The station gained Class A status and became KTAZ-CA in March 2002. Displaced by a neighbouring station's digital plans on channel 25, it moved to UHF channel 34 in 2002. On November 6, 2004, its call letters were changed to KFTU-CA, establishing a shared identity with the Douglas parent, and the call sign became KFTU-CD when it transitioned to digital broadcasting on March 19, 2012.
KFTU also previously had another Tucson repeater, K48GX on analogue channel 48, which covered areas northwest of the city that are shielded by terrain from the KFTU-CD signal. Univision surrendered that licence to the FCC in June 2015, and it was cancelled. Like its sister station KFPH-DT in Flagstaff, KFTU has historically branded itself using the channel number of its in-city repeater — in Tucson, UniMás 34 — although its current branding is the statewide UniMás Arizona identity it shares with the Phoenix-market operation.
Relationship with KUVE-DT
KFTU operates in a duopoly with KUVE-DT (channel 46), the Univision owned-and-operated station licensed to Green Valley that serves Tucson. The two stations are bound together technically as well as corporately. Because KFTU's own coverage does not reach the whole market, KFTU-DT is rebroadcast on KUVE-DT's second digital subchannel, which can be seen on channel 46.2 from KUVE's transmitter atop Mount Bigelow. Conversely, KUVE's Univision service is rebroadcast on KFTU's second digital subchannel, so that viewers in the Douglas and Bisbee area within KFTU's genuine coverage can receive both networks from the one transmitter. The two stations share studios on Forbes Boulevard in Tucson. Master control and most internal operations for both stations are based at the facilities of their larger sister station, KTVW-DT on 30th Street in southern Phoenix, reflecting TelevisaUnivision's practice of hubbing its Arizona stations' operations in Phoenix while keeping local studio presence in Tucson.
Programming: The UniMás Network
KFTU's programme schedule is the UniMás network feed. UniMás — launched as Telefutura in January 2002 and renamed in January 2013 — is TelevisaUnivision's second United States broadcast network, offering Spanish-language programming that complements the Univision schedule carried locally on KUVE. KFTU has carried that network since its launch day, as one of its charter stations, and previously operated only briefly as an independent station in 2001 and early 2002 before the network existed. The station does not maintain a separate local news operation of its own; Arizona Spanish-language news for the TelevisaUnivision stations is produced from Phoenix, and the Tucson stations' local identity is carried principally through their shared branding as UniMás Arizona and Univision Arizona and their Forbes Boulevard studio presence. For Spanish-speaking viewers in Tucson and southeastern Arizona, the KFTU and KUVE pair provides the two-network service — Univision for the flagship schedule and UniMás on channel 3 and its Tucson repeater — that the company offers in its larger markets.
Technical Information
KFTU's transmitter is located on Juniper Flats Road northwest of Bisbee, in Cochise County. The station's licensed effective radiated power is modest for a full-power station at 5 kW, but its height above average terrain is considerable — 685 metres — reflecting its mountainous transmitter site. Its FCC facility ID is 81441. Its repeater, KFTU-CD in Tucson, operates with 15 kW from the Mount Bigelow site it shares with KUVE, at a height above average terrain of more than a thousand metres, which is how the service achieves metropolitan coverage despite the parent station's distance from the city. KFTU's own signal is multiplexed into two programme streams: 3.1 carries UniMás in high definition, and 3.2 carries a simulcast of KUVE-DT's Univision service.
Digital Transition and the Flash-Cut
KFTU's digital conversion followed a different path from most full-power stations. Because its original construction permit was granted after the FCC finalised the digital television allotment plan in April 1997, the station never received a companion digital channel. Instead, at the end of the digital conversion period on June 12, 2009, KFTU-TV was required to switch off its analogue signal and switch on its digital signal in a single move known as a flash-cut. There was a further complication: its analogue position, channel 3, sits in the low-VHF band, which proved troublesome for digital reception in many markets. KFTU was therefore permitted to choose a different channel for digital operation, and it selected UHF channel 36, on which it has broadcast digitally ever since while continuing to display virtual channel 3. Its Class A repeater in Tucson followed a separate timetable, as low-power stations were exempt from the 2009 shutdown; KFTU-CD received its digital licence in March 2012. The result is a station whose viewers know it as channel 3, whose transmitter radiates on channel 36 from the hills near Bisbee, and whose Tucson audience mostly watches a digital repeater on channel 34 — a layered technical identity that matches its layered history as a permit passed between three owners before it ever broadcast a network programme.
