Lee Partners and Bain Capital to force its completion, the sale was finalized on March 14, 2008. Although the Providence/Newport purchase separated ownership of the television and radio stations, KLRT and KASN continued to operate from the Colonel Glenn Road complex. On July 19, 2012, Irving, Texas–based Nexstar Broadcasting Group—owner of KARK-TV and KARZ-TV—purchased 12 of Newport's 27 stations, including KASN and KLRT, for $285.5 million. Because of FCC regulations prohibiting companies from owning two of the four highest-rated stations and more than two stations overall in the same market, the licenses of KASN and KLRT were transferred to Westlake, Ohio–based Mission Broadcasting (which owns stations managed by Nexstar in markets where the latter cannot legally own multiple television properties) for $60 million. The sale of KLRT/KASN to Mission received FCC approval on December 10, 2012, and was completed on January 3, 2013; Nexstar took over the operations of KASN and KLRT, which were relocated to KARK/KARZ's Victory Building studios on West Capitol Avenue, under a local marketing agreement on February 2, 2013. As a result, Nexstar/Mission's Little Rock cluster became one of only two "virtual quadropolies"—four local full-power stations managed by one company—in existence in American television. (Sinclair Broadcast Group maintains a similar arrangement in the Mobile–Pensacola market involving Sinclair-owned WEAR-TV and WFGX, and WPMI and WJTC, which Sinclair partner Deerfield Media concurrently purchased from Newport.) Technical information Subchannels The station's digital signal is multiplexed: Analog-to-digital conversion; spectrum repack KASN signed on its digital signal on UHF channel 39 on September 4, 2002. The station shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 38, on February 17, 2009, the original deadline for American full-power television stations to transition exclusively to digital broadcasts (which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 39, continuing to use virtual channel 38. As a part of the broadcast frequency repacking process following the 2016–17 FCC incentive auction, KASN relocated its digital signal to UHF channel 34 on November 30, 2018. References External links The CW Arkansas ASN The CW affiliates Rewind TV affiliates Ion Television affiliates Defy TV affiliates TrueReal affiliates Television channels and stations established in 1986 Nexstar Media Group 1986 establishments in Arkansas