KIKX was a radio station on 580 kHz in Tucson, Arizona, which operated from April 10, 1947, until closing on July 18, 1982. The station lost its FCC license due to a 1974 kidnapping hoax involving one of the station's disc jockeys. History As KCNA and KTAN The Catalina Broadcasting Corporation signed on KCNA at 1340 kHz on April 10, 1947. It broadcast with 250 watts from a transmitter located at Cherry Avenue and 16th Street, using an RCA transmitter that was boasted to be the largest ever shipment in that company's history, and at the time, it was Tucson's only locally owned radio station. KCNA initially presented popular and classical music, along with hourly news reports. On November 8, 1951, KCNA relocated to 580 kHz, where it was able to raise daytime power to 5,000 watts and operate at night with 500 watts; its transmitter moved to a three-tower site along Swan Road, and that same year, the station became the broadcaster of the University of Arizona Wildcats football team. The relocated, higher-power KCNA, an ABC affiliate, advertised its coverage as including areas as distant as Phoenix, Lordsburg, New Mexico, and Caborca, Sonora. The new KCNA transmitter site was built with a television saddle on the middle tower to accommodate a future TV station. In 1952, KCNA applied for a television license and received a construction permit to build KCNA-TV, which would have broadcast on VHF channel 9 and expected to start operations in the fall of 1953. As late as April 1953, KCNA reported it was buying television equipment with an aim to sign on in December. On August 31, 1953, the directors of the Catalina Broadcasting Corporation unanimously agreed to surrender their construction permit, believing market conditions made it "impossible at this time to operate a third television station in the Tucson area"; though they said they expected to reapply for a television station when Tucson could support it, this never came to be. That same year, control of the station was transferred to fiction writer Erskine Caldwell. (Channel 9 would eventually be occupied by KGUN-TV beginning in 1956.) In 1956, the station was sold to Harry B. and George B. Chambers, who changed the call sign to KTAN in 1959. Ownership quipped of the new designation, "We've just changed our call letters to go with Tucson's climate". Sale to Walton and early KIKX years John B.