Tucson had been allocated noncommercial educational channel 6 in 1952, but it was not until 1958 that the
University of Arizona (UA) applied to build a television station to use it. They proposed to initially broadcast two hours a night, five nights a week. The university had already remodeled Herring Hall to house radio and television studios, with the latter occupying a space once used as part of a gymnasium and auditorium. Filed on April 3, the application and permit were granted by the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on July 16, sending $40,000 from the
Ford Foundation to the university for equipment. After the university rejected the first two bids for the job as too high and re-bid the task out, the tower was erected in November to support the antenna for the new station; while that happened, the university made its first telecast—a
closed-circuit event in which a
pharmacology class watched a demonstration of techniques to measure
blood pressure. The first test pattern went out on February 6, and KUAT launched on March 8, 1959, as the first public television station in Arizona. It was an affiliate of
National Educational Television (NET) from 1959 until 1970, when NET was replaced by
PBS. In addition to university programs, the
Tucson Unified School District was part of its operation, with a weekly show summarizing school activities. That fall, the first daytime educational broadcasts were made, consisting of university classes. In 1964, the university prepared an expansion of the initial facility, which had an effective radiated power of 944 watts. The university applied to move its transmitter to
Tumamoc Hill, which would increase coverage from a to a radius, and new studios were planned in the forthcoming Modern Languages Building. The
Federal Aviation Administration approved the tower site, but the university decided to relocate its main transmitter to
Mount Bigelow, already in use by the three commercial stations in town, after protests from the
Air Line Pilots Association over the proximity of the mast to the
Tucson International Airport. The new studios and transmitter would be capable of
broadcasting in color. The
Arizona Board of Regents approved the plans in April 1967, and color transmission from the new studios and transmitter began on October 1, 1968. In preparation, K71BQ, a channel 71 translator, was built at the Tumamoc Hill site to serve neighborhoods in northwest Tucson that are shaded from Mount Bigelow by terrain. A day before the color conversion, on September 30, 1968, the University of Arizona returned to radio for the first time since the 1920s after receiving the donation of KFIF (1550 AM), which became KUAT (and is now
KUAZ), from John Walton. In 1977, construction work began on a satellite dish in a vacant swimming pool south of the Bear Down Gymnasium, allowing the station to receive PBS programming via satellite when it began use the next year. In the 1980s, KUAT upgraded its service to the northwest side. As early as 1982, plans existed to replace K71BQ with a higher-power translator on channel 27. This became reality as K27AT in December 1985. As channel 27 had been designated for noncommercial full-power use, the university filed to build out a full-power facility on channel 27 in 1985; this was completed as KUAS-TV in July 1988. In 1994, KUAT-TV launched the UA Channel, a
public access channel featuring university content and lectures. the two transmitters were converted to digital in 2002 and 2003, with KUAS-TV on Tumamoc Hill being switched first and becoming the first digital television service in Tucson. After providing $2.6 million in cash to AZPM in the 2013–2014 school year, the University of Arizona planned cuts for 2014–2015 of $400,000 and continued cuts until 2019. In 2021, the UA announced it was exploring the possibility of constructing a $45 million complex for AZPM south of the campus at The Bridges, home to
Tech Parks Arizona, having already raised 75 percent of the projected cost without launching a public campaign. The university released renderings of the proposed facility, the Paul and Alice Baker Center for Public Media, in September 2023. Ground was broken on the structure in January 2024, by which time the cost had increased to $65 million. ==Local programming==