Channel 5 (Cox Cable 4), Digital 39 is a noncommercial educational television station. It is licensed
by the Federal Communications Commission to the University’s Board of Regents and is
operated by the Division of the Office of the Provost at Texas Tech University's
Educational Television Department. The Broadcast operation is part of a telecommuncations
service center that includes a seven-channel cable system, capable of feeding
instructional television programming to classrooms throughout the campus, and a
multiterminal telecommunications receive-only earth station, providing the
university’s principal access to communications satellites.
Channel 5’s
office, professional production studio, master-control, transmitter and engineering
facilities, and its 817-foot antenna-tower are located on the southwestern campus
triangle, west of Indiana Avenue. From this location the station broadcasts approximately
105 hours of very diverse programming each week. The signal coverage zone, encompassing
the geographical area within a 60-mile radius (75-mile radius digital) of Lubbock,
Texas, a population of
approximately 380,000.
KTXT-TV is a member of
the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), a noncommercial network of 349 television stations
interconnected by satellite. The station is staffed by professional personnel who produce
some of the programs it broadcasts. They also produce programming to satisfy
nonbroadcasting needs of the University and the community.
Much of the station’s regular
programming is used in the University’s classroom instruction. There is an active
campus demand for downlinking professional training and/or discipline-oriented satellite
teleconferences for university students, faculty, administration, and staff. As a PBS
Adult Learning Services member, the station has the option of purchasing instructional
television series that have been designed as college-credit courses or as less formal
noncredit courses on special broadcast
schedules, or distributing them in video tape format as a service to the University and
Channel 5’s South Plains viewers.
KTXT-TV began the
transition to digital in the Fall of 2002 and broadcast its first digital
signal in December of 2003. Both analog and
digital broadcasting will continue until 2006 when the analog signal is
required to be discontinued. If you would like to know more about digital
television visit our local update on
the digital transition or the PBS website.
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