planned television station's call letters. In the meantime, Oliveira returned to KVUE in 1987. The original decision was affirmed on October 30, 1987, when the FCC approved a settlement agreement between the seven applicants and granted Balcones's amended application for UHF channel 54. Balcones' grant was subsequently challenged by Frontier Southwest Broadcasting Inc., only to be upheld on April 15, 1988 on grounds that denying the application in its favor would otherwise nullify Frontier's existing construction permit for a low-power station on UHF channel 55. On October 12, 1990, Balcones filed to sell the license to 54 Broadcasting Inc. (owned by Ron Oliveira and Billy Goldberg, along with Billy's wife, Rosalie Goldberg, and son Mark Goldberg of private equity firm Goldberg-Hirsch Ventures and a special assistant to the Texas State Comptroller at the time, and Mark Cohen and Mitchel Levy of LS Communications) for assumption of liabilities and payments to the Balcones partners to cover permit acquisition costs. The transfer received FCC approval 17 months later on March 26, 1992. Partly as a result of the sagging Texas economy caused by the oil bust of the late 1980s, the Goldberg-Oliveira consortium could not economically start up the station until it obtained financial backing from Houston-based investment firm 21st Century Corp. Aiding in helping 54 Broadcasting get the station on the air was LIN TV Corporation—then-owner of NBC affiliate KXAN-TV (channel 36)—with which the consortium entered into a local marketing agreement (LMA) in the spring of 1994, in which KXAN would provide technical, programming and advertising resources. Channel 54—as KNVA (meaning "Nueva," in reference to the originally planned Spanish-language format)—began test broadcasts on August 24, 1994, in order to meet an FCC-required deadline to commence broadcasts by the end of that month to maintain the license. The station formally signed on the air one week later on August 31 (one week before Oliveira left his role as KVUE weeknight co-anchor to focus on managing KNVA). It was originally formatted as a 24-hour weather forecast service—with content selected by the on-duty meteorologist—that featured loops of Doppler radar and satellite imagery, current conditions from KXAN's live weather observation network (along with maps detailing actual and apparent temperatures, and wind speeds within the viewing area), area lake levels, pollen counts, and local and regional forecasts as well as live and pre-recorded forecast segments presented by KXAN-TV's meteorologists. The format—which included breakaways for brief commercial