Tustin, and its transmitter is located atop Mount Wilson
.
History
Channel 40 first launched on January 5, 1967, as KLXA-TV, licensed to
KMEX-TV
(channel 34).
TBN founder
PTL Club
. TBN used the full name Praise the Lord. The Crouches continued to expand their religious programming to twelve hours a day by 1975, and began selling time to outside Christian organizations to supplement their local programming.
Trinity Broadcasting continued to use the KLXA call sign until November 1977, when the station officially became KTBN-TV. The station went to a 24-hour schedule by 1978. Its city of license was later relocated to Santa Ana in 1983. Today, as is the case with TBN's other owned-and-operated stations, KTBN repeats the national TBN feed for almost the entire day. It only breaks off for Southern California-specific public affairs programs. Even when TBN bought other Christian stations (such as WHFT-TV in Miami, among others), the network ended local operations at those stations and replaced their programming with TBN's national feed.
Today, KTBN-TV serves the entire
Los Angeles metropolitan area with a full-power signal. The station originally had a network of low-poweredtranslators carrying the signal to other areas in Southern California; however, during 2010, these translators went dark due to declining support, which has been attributed to the digital transition, and likely universal carriage of the network by the cable and satellite providers in the region. With the station being available on cable providers throughout Southern California, KTBN is not carried among the Los Angeles market stations available on either Dish Network or DirecTV
at TBN's request; the national feed is carried in its place instead, but TBN's subchannel sister networks are not available.
TBN-owned full-power stations permanently ceased analog transmissions on April 16, 2009.
Analog-to-digital conversion
KTBN's digital signal, which went on the air in 2004, originally broadcast on channel 23. Trinity Broadcasting Network's request to change the station's digital channel to (
KSMV-LP
, which soon converted to digital on channel 23. Queries to the FCC database on KTBN indicated that the station had a construction permit for digital UHF channel 33, which the station used as its final post-transition digital allotment.
