When KLRN in San Antonio was built, it was designed to serve both San Antonio and Austin, as there was interest in building a public television station in San Antonio but not enough funding until the University of Texas got involved. It had studios in both cities (in Austin, at the Jesse H. Jones Communications Center on the UT Austin campus). Its transmitter was located at New Braunfels, providing enough signal to provide coverage to San Antonio and Austin, but this arrangement proved insufficient to cover all of Travis and Williamson counties, and reception in Austin had been poorer than expected due to intervening hilly terrain. The Southwest Texas Public Broadcasting Council, owner of KLRN, filed to build a new television station on Austin's noncommercial reserved channel 18 in 1975 and received a construction permit on September 3, 1976.