Stockton, 50 miles to the south, got a TV station of its own in 1954. It found a spot atop Mount Diablo that allowed it to "cover" not only its home market but also parts of Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area, and thus was born "KOVR" on channel 13.
But KOVR, which began as an independent, wanted an ABC affiliation (KCRA was NBC and KBET was with CBS), and ABC didn't want the big KOVR signal drawing viewers away from its owned-and-operated KGO-TV in San Francisco. So KOVR agreed to move down off its perch high on Diablo, to a temporary spot in the hills near Jackson. It still needed to find a spot that would allow it to serve all of what had by now become the Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto market, though.
And if KOVR was going to reach all of that market, stretching 100 miles up and down the Central Valley, KCRA and KBET (which became KXTV in 1959) weren't about to be left behind with Sacramento-only signals.