ABT's decision delayed construction commencement of the new service until May 1987. By October 1987 the new station had begun to build rebroadcast sites and new studios and a main transmitter based in Alice Springs were completed. Imparja's first test program, Australia versus Sri Lanka Test Cricket, was telecast on 2 January 1988 in Alice Springs. Two weeks later, on 15 January 1988, the station was officially inaugurated at Imparja Television's head office in Alice Springs by Minister for Communications Ralph Willis and Warren Snowdon, the Australian federal member of parliament for the Division of Lingiari in Northern Territory. Imparja became the first Aboriginal member of the Federation of Australian Commercial Television Stations and the now-defunct Regional Television Association, both dominant organisations at the time. Imparja was chaired by Freda Glynn for its first ten years and, for a time, she was the only female chair of a television network in the world. Freda was one of the first three founders of CAAMA – the others being John Macumba and Philip Batty. Imparja had an initial population reach of 62,000 people, which by 1993 had grown to 125,000. Imparja was available through retransmission sites at Ceduna, Coober Pedy, Leigh Creek and Woomera in South Australia, and Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Katherine and Bathurst Island in the Northern Territory, as well as on the Optus Aurora satellite platform. Imparja initially carried programming from all three major Australian commercial television networks, but following aggregation of market area with QSTV, it affiliated with the Nine Network and Network Ten. Imparja also screened some ABC Television and SBS Television indigenous programs, all in addition to original programs commissioned by the station. 1990s In 1990, Imparja Local News was launched as a fifteen-minute insert of local news into the national bulletin. The station also covered the Northern Territory general election live from its Alice Springs studios. This followed the lead taken in 1989 when the station began to produce weather reports for parts of the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales, presented by Lavinia Hampton. By 1993, Imparja's viewing audience had doubled to approximately 125,000 Australians. This in turn led to the increased allocation of government funding in 1994 to produce Yamba's Playtime, which was the station's first in-house televisual production. Yamba's Playtime features the station's official mascot, "Yamba". Also in 1994, the Imparja board of directors established the Imparja Business Development Sub