The station closed in 1965 and began a quest to move a VHF allocation to Salina, which ended in failure when the Federal Communications Commission ruled the proposal technically deficient in 1968.
[4] On May 17, 1963, Prairie States took KSLN-TV off the air and announced that it would sell channel 34 to a new buyer: the Mid-America Broadcasting Company, which also owned the cable television system in Salina.
[6] An objector soon appeared: the Wichita Television Corporation, owner of the Kansas State Network and applicant for a TV translator of the KSN station at Great Bend, KCKT, which would serve Salina.
[7] The Federal Communications Commission approved the sale in February 1964, saying that the CATV system was small—with just 122 subscribers—and that Prairie States had been forced to pull the plug on channel 34 due to financial difficulties.
In its arguments, Mid-America stated that the conversion rate of VHF sets to tune its channel 34 station was low, and that KSLN-TV had ceased operations twice for financial reasons.
[14] While local business groups in Salina supported the position, other broadcasters, including the channel 6 stations in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Omaha, Nebraska, filed oppositions, as did KSN.
[14] The FCC, in its decision on January 10, 1968, denied the petition from Mid-America, saying that Salina was still an area for potential development of UHF, that it had inadequate VHF service, that Mid-America would be better served trying to increase KSLN-TV's power, and that the changing of the educational assignment to channel 6 would create a "degraded and limiting" facility that could not provide appropriate service.