KHET: PBS Hawaii and Sixty Years of Island Storytelling
KHET, channel 11, branded as PBS Hawaii, is the PBS member television station licensed to Honolulu, Hawaii, serving the entire Hawaiian Islands. Owned by the Hawaii Public Television Foundation, a nonprofit governed by a volunteer board of directors, it is the flagship of Hawaii's only statewide public television service. Its studios are at the Clarence T. C. Ching Campus on Sand Island Access Road in Honolulu, and its main transmitter is on Palehua Ridge, north of Makakilo on Oahu. Its signal reaches the rest of the state through full-power satellite KMEB, channel 10 in Wailuku, Maui, and a network of low-power translators.
KHET first went on the air on April 15, 1966, broadcasting from the cafeteria of the University Lab School as the Hawaii Educational Television Network. In 2026 the station marked its 60th anniversary with a year of reflection under the theme of storytelling — an apt summary of a station whose local programs, from Hawaiian music to student journalism, exist to record the voices of the islands. Its website is pbshawaii.org, as listed in this directory, and it describes itself as the only locally owned, statewide television station in Hawaii and the state's only licensed educational broadcaster.
Overview
As a PBS community licensee, KHET carries the national PBS schedule — news, documentary, science, history, drama, arts and children's programming — on its main channel, presented as channel 11.1 in Honolulu and 10.1 via KMEB on Maui. Its subchannels include PBS Kids services, with program guides listing channels 11.1 through 11.3 for KHET and 10.1 through 10.3 for KMEB. Statewide availability is reinforced by carriage on Spectrum and Hawaiian Telcom cable systems and on DirecTV, making PBS Hawaii accessible on every major island regardless of antenna reception.
The station is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization. According to its own description, it is mostly supported by the community — individuals, families, businesses and charitable foundations — with about fifteen percent of its operating budget coming indirectly from the federal government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. President and CEO Ron Mizutani, a former KHON news anchor, has led the station in its recent period and fronted its 60th anniversary reflections in 2026.
History
KHET was officially launched on April 15, 1966, under the name Hawaii Educational Television, following the launch pattern of educational stations across the United States in that decade. Its first home was modest: broadcasts originated from the cafeteria at the University Lab School. It was the second station in Honolulu to use channel 11, after KONA, which had moved to channel 2 — a move connected to the era's channel-allocation decisions, under which the FCC had at one point planned to reserve channel 7 and later placed channel 11 in a different allocation posture in the islands.
The station's Maui satellite, KMEB, followed on September 22, 1966, extending educational television beyond Oahu within the service's first year. For almost fifty years PBS Hawaii was based on Dole Street, on the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The station's identity evolved with its names: Hawaii Educational Television gave way to Hawaii Public Television in 1970, and the service became PBS Hawaii in 2003, the name it carries today. It broadcasts around the clock on cable, serving a state whose island communities are separated by open ocean yet form a single television market centred on Honolulu.
The Move to Sand Island
In 2016, after fifty years on Dole Street, PBS Hawaii moved to its current home at 315 Sand Island Access Road in Honolulu, in a renovated and expanded facility on the former site of commercial stations KFVE and KHNL. The campus is named the Clarence T. C. Ching Campus. The move gave the public broadcaster a purpose-built, modern production centre of its own, no longer housed within a university campus, from which its local series are produced and its statewide service is originated.
The Sand Island facility matters symbolically as well as practically. A station that began in a school cafeteria, then spent half a century as a university tenant, now operates from a campus built for public media — a physical expression of its claim to be a permanent civic institution for Hawaii, in the same way its transmitter and translator network is a permanent part of the state's communications landscape.
Ownership and Mission
KHET is owned by the Hawaii Public Television Foundation, governed by a volunteer board of directors. PBS Hawaii characterizes itself as the only locally owned statewide television station in Hawaii — in a market where the commercial network affiliates are owned by mainland groups, the public station is the locally governed broadcaster. It is the sole Hawaii member of PBS and the only licensed educational broadcaster in the state.
Its mission, as the station expresses it, is to serve the community through local content and engagement, produced with what it calls a multimedia approach balanced by a human touch. In practice that means its schedule and its community work are judged not by ratings alone but by educational value, cultural preservation and the representation of Hawaii's diverse communities — including Native Hawaiian culture and language, and the many ethnic communities whose cooking, music and stories appear in its local productions.
Local Programming
Local production is PBS Hawaii's distinction. Its longest-running local series, Na Mele, celebrates traditional Hawaiian music; station leadership in 2026 described it as having been part of Hawaii's soundtrack for 25 years, honouring the artists who carry the islands' stories and sense of place. Insights on PBS Hawaii is a weekly, live, one-hour public affairs program in which guests address the state's issues — its topics in the early 2020s ranged from the pandemic's effects on employment and mental health to affordable housing, the Red Hill water crisis, illegal fireworks and whether Hawaii should become an open-carry state.
HIKI NO — "can do" in Hawaiian — is the station's student journalism project, in which school students across the state produce video stories; it entered its second decade in the early 2020s with a focus on digital content and on developing the next generation of community leaders, and during the pandemic its students contributed video-journal reflections on distance learning. Kakou: Hawaii's Town Hall convenes periodic live discussions of community questions, in one season asking how much tourism is too much. Home is Here, the station's newest franchise, launched in February 2022, is a monthly program showcasing the people, places, culture, traditions, music and food that make Hawaii home, hosted by Kala'i Miller. Earlier local landmarks remembered in anniversary coverage include the cooking series The Chan-ese Way with Titus Chan and the sports talk programme Leahey & Leahey with Jim and Kanoa Leahey, as well as Long Story Short with Leslie Wilcox and the national Pacific series Pacific Heartbeat.
National Programming and Audience Rituals
Alongside its local slate, KHET carries the PBS programs that have formed shared rituals for Hawaii families across generations. Anniversary coverage in 2026 recalled children learning from Sesame Street and The Electric Company, and families gathering for PBS NewsHour, Nature and Masterpiece. Station president Ron Mizutani described his own childhood in Kalihi watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and The Electric Company — an illustration of how the station's national children's and prime-time services have bound generations of Hawaii viewers to the same channel.
That intergenerational audience is central to KHET's role. Before streaming and smartphones, the station functioned as a statewide gathering place; its leadership argues the core mission — to inform, connect and preserve Hawaii's stories — continues even as viewing migrates to digital platforms and social media. Programs are streamed and promoted across PBS Hawaii's digital channels, but the over-the-air service on channels 11 and 10 remains the universal foundation.
Statewide Reach: KMEB and Translators
Hawaii's geography makes KHET's distribution system its defining technical challenge. The state is an archipelago; no single transmitter can serve it. KHET's Oahu signal, from Palehua Ridge above Makakilo, covers the Honolulu metropolitan area, while KMEB in Wailuku, with its transmitter at Ulupalakua on Maui, relays the service as a full-power satellite, and a network of low-power translators — no fewer than a dozen by station counts — reaches the other islands, including Kauai and Hawaii Island. Spectrum and Hawaiian Telcom carriage ensure statewide availability on cable.
Reception has not always been simple. After Hawaii's early digital transition, Honolulu viewers in neighbourhoods such as Makiki reported difficulty receiving KHET's digital signal with converter boxes, a function of transmitter location on the Waianae mountain ridge and of VHF digital propagation around high-rise obstructions. Station staff addressed such questions publicly at the time, explaining how the ridge location and terrain affected line-of-sight across Oahu — a reminder that in island topography, even a flagship signal's reach is negotiated ridge by ridge and valley by valley.
Technical Details
KHET broadcasts as virtual channel 11 and digitally on VHF channel 11; KMEB displays as channel 10. The main Oahu transmitter is on Palehua Ridge, north of Makakilo, at the south end of the Waianae Mountains. The multiplex presents the main PBS service in high definition, with additional subchannels including PBS Kids programming and, in listings, an NHK World/PBS Kids combination on a secondary channel. Translator stations rebroadcast KMEB and KHET across Kauai, Maui County and Hawaii Island, including multiple translators serving Hilo and Lihue areas.
Capital maintenance of that system is a continuing story in the station's own reporting: its 2021 local content report noted the replacement of the modulators for both full-power transmitters, KHET and KMEB, improving signal quality statewide, the replacement of the translator equipment building at Anahola, Kauai, with a durable fiberglass shelter, and the adoption of IP-based closed-captioning encoding for local productions. Such unglamorous investments are what keep a 1966-vintage service reliable across an ocean-separated coverage area.
Community Role and Funding
PBS Hawaii's community model distinguishes it from every commercial station in this directory. It is community-funded, working with nonprofits and grassroots groups to give their work a platform, and its leadership frames its approach as partnership rather than performance, prioritizing impact over ratings. Its slogan, "Home is Here" — shared with its flagship local franchise — positions the station as a keeper of local identity in a state where questions of belonging, tourism pressure, housing and cultural preservation are everyday public issues, regularly examined on Insights and Kakou.
Educational service is woven through that role: HIKI NO trains students statewide in storytelling and journalism; children's programming on its subchannels provides a commercial-free educational service; and its archives — drawn on in series such as PBS Hawaii Classics, which revisits programs like the 1989 Spectrum Hawaii — preserve a moving-image record of Hawaii life stretching back to the 1968 Constitutional Convention coverage by its predecessor network.
Recent Developments and the 60th Anniversary
In April 2026, PBS Hawaii marked sixty years since its first broadcast. The anniversary special "PBS Hawaii: 60 Years of Storytelling," hosted by musician Keola Beamer, premiered April 30, 2026, and anniversary coverage in Hawaii media reflected on the station's journey from a university lab school cafeteria to the Sand Island campus. The station used the milestone to restate its forward programme: continuing Na Mele, HIKI NO, Insights, Home is Here and Kakou alongside national series such as Masterpiece, Nova and Nature, supported by community giving.
Six decades on, KHET's essential facts have proved durable: a Honolulu license on channel 11, a Maui satellite on channel 10, a nonprofit owner governed by local volunteers, and a schedule that places Hawaii's own music, students, chefs, historians and public debates beside the best of national public television. In a state that is simultaneously one market and many islands, PBS Hawaii remains the broadcaster built to hold the whole archipelago in a single conversation.
