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KQDS-TV, virtual channel 21 (UHF digital channel 17), is a Fox-affiliated television station located in Duluth, Minnesota, United States, which also serves Superior, Wisconsin. The station is owned by Red River Broadcasting. KQDS maintains studio facilities located on London Road in Duluth (along I-35), and its transmitter is located west of downtown in Hilltop Park. Master control and some internal operations are based out of the studio facilities of sister station and fellow Fox affiliate KVRR on South 40th Street and South 9th Avenue in Fargo, North Dakota. Syndicated programs broadcast on KQDS include ''Two and a Half Men'', ''Divorce Court'', ''Everybody Loves Raymond'', ''Family Feud'', ''The People's Court'' and ''The Big Bang Theory''. ==History== The station first signed on the air on September 20, 1994, as KNLD. Very few people knew the station was actually on the air at this time, as KQDS transmitted at low power with an extremely limited schedule of programming, usually airing only for only four hours per day each morning--the minimum required by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to cover the license. The station was Duluth's first independent station. While the Northland had grown large enough to support an independent station at least a decade earlier, it is a very large market geographically. UHF stations do not cover large areas very well. Additionally, the major stations in the market need sizable networks of translators to adequately cover the market, and the cost of building a translator network scared off perspective owners. By the 1990s, cable television--a must for acceptable television in much of this market--had gained enough penetration to make an independent station viable. Although its lineup once included Big Ten college football, most of the station's schedule was filled with programming from the Shop at Home Network by the late-1990s. In 1998, Red River Broadcasting (via sister company KQDS Acquisition Corporation) purchased KNLD and several area radio stations including KQDS (1490 AM), KQDS-FM (94.9 FM), WWAX (92.1 FM) and KZIO (94.1 and 104.3 FM), and later changed the television station's call sign to KQDS-TV. The new owners ran into some controversy as they tried to upgrade the station. It was attempting to construct a new tower to replace its old transmitter facility located adjacent to Duluth Central High School, which would give it a coverage area comparable to the other Duluth stations. However, some school and city officials expressed concern about the danger of ice falling from the tower onto the school's parking lot. Although the new tower had already been approved by city officials, KQDS agreed to build it further from the parking lot than initially planned. The station became the Duluth-Superior market's first Fox affiliate on September 1, 1999. Prior to affiliating with the network, Fox programming was available in the market only through cable systems that had carried the network through either Foxnet or Fox's affiliates in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul market (KMSP-TV from 1986 to 1988 and WFTC from 1988 onward). That same day, the station activated its new transmitter tower, along with the sign-on of eight translators. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「KQDS-TV」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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