KENS - Digital Television

Digital Television

KENS shut down its analog signal on June 12, 2009, as part of the DTV transition in the United States. KENS remained on its current pre-transition channel number, 39 using PSIP to display KENS' virtual channel as 5. This move also allowed former sister station KCWX (which prior to the conversion, did not have an over-the-air digital signal) to begin digital broadcasts on channel 5.

Prior to November 2008, KENS-DT was on channel 55, which was vacated early by the station to allow Qualcomm to begin testing for its MediaFLO mobile television service, which is transmitted via the former UHF channel 55 allocation. In the interim period between November 2008 and June 2009, KENS-DT's digital signal was broadcast on a subchannel of KWEX-DT (mapped to virtual channel 5.1), which broadcast on channel 39 prior to the transition; since the entire KWEX schedule was at the time 480i standard definition, KENS continued broadcasting in full 1080i high definition without any problems between the two operations. After the digital transition was complete, KENS-DT retained the channel 39 facilities, while KWEX-DT launched its permanent digital operations on channel 41 (the station's previous analog frequency).