on March 26, 1969, the FCC having approved the change to channel 2 earlier in the month, and the commission granted the application on September 10. With the permit approved, construction commenced nearly immediately; in January 1970, power lines were buried under Mormon Mountain to provide electrical service to the summit. The transmitter facility was complete by early April, when the first test patterns went out, and KOAI began broadcasting on May 2, 1970. It was some time before the station began producing local programming, as the studios at 528 W. Aspen were not yet completed. KOAI was among the first stations seen on much of the Navajo Nation when a tribe-owned translator was completed atop Navajo Mountain in 1973. At the time, the station produced and aired a daily Navajo-language news program hosted by Chester Yazzie; the program was aired the next day on KIVA-TV in Farmington, New Mexico, and later also on KOAT-TV in Albuquerque. It was the only Navajo-language television program in the world at the time. Wendell Elliott Sr. died in 1974 of an apparent heart attack. His son, Wendell Elliott Jr., took over the operation of the business, which was claimed to be the fourth-smallest TV station in the United States. KNAZ-TV In 1980, the Grand Canyon Television Company approved the sale of KOAI to Capitol Broadcasting Company of Jackson, Mississippi, which owned radio and television stations in the Mississippi city and KKTV in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Capitol closed on the sale in February 1981 and immediately sought to improve all aspects of the operation. On March 23, 1981, the call sign was changed to KNAZ-TV to represent the station's service area. (Kevin McCabe, a longtime Phoenix sports journalist who worked for channel 2 at the time, noted that people had "laughed" at KOAI for the preceding decade and that the station had set a "bad precedent".) A new maximum-power transmitter at 100,000 watts was installed; the news department was expanded; and Capitol also moved the station into a new building on Vickey Street in 1982. With the upgraded building came much-needed technical updates, notably a conversion to electronic news gathering on videotape from film. While Capitol Broadcasting, owned by the Hederman family as well as Standard Life Insurance, put all of its properties up for sale in late 1982, they continued to own the station for nearly six more years. During that time, Grand