Texas Public Radio (TPR) is a public radio broadcaster based in San Antonio, Texas, United States, providing NPR and other public radio programming to south-central and West Texas, including San Antonio, the Texas Hill Country, and the Big Spring area. In San Antonio, TPR broadcasts two program services: classical music on KPAC (88.3 FM) and NPR talk and information on KSTX (89.1 FM); most of the other stations are satellites of KSTX. TPR is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and listener support. Its studios are located in the Irma & Emilio Nicolas Media Center in downtown San Antonio.

KPAC began broadcasting on November 7, 1982, as a non-commercial, all-classical music station under the aegis of the Classical Broadcasting Society of San Antonio. Its founder, arts patron Wilford Stapp, sought to fill the void created when classical music slowly disappeared from San Antonio commercial station KMFM. Meanwhile, attempts to bring a public radio station to San Antonio dated to the early 1970s. The construction permit for what became KSTX was issued in 1979, but construction was stymied by internal issues and difficulty receiving public support. Ultimately, the permitholders and KPAC agreed to merge, enabling KSTX to begin broadcasting NPR to San Antonio in 1988. The other stations in the TPR network were built or acquired between 1997 and 2017.

Beginning in 1964, KMFM 96.1, founded by oilman Harry Pennington, had served as a commercial classical music station in the San Antonio area. After Pennington's death in 1975, his widow sold the station, which began to change to a more commercially lucrative format. Sensing that the sale would lead to the end of classical music on KMFM, supporters of classical music began planning for a new, non-commercial station to serve as its eventual replacement. In 1977, the Classical Broadcasting Society of San Antonio was chartered. It took years to identify an available frequency for non-commercial use in San Antonio—90.9 MHz, at the time allocated to Seguin—and have the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Mexican authorities agree to move it to San Antonio.

From a transmitter atop a ten-story office building on Nine Mile Hill, KPAC began broadcasting on November 7, 1982. It got on the air with donated equipment—including a transmitter from KMFM and the station's collection of classical records—and had 2,000 members by August 1983. Nearly from its start, it operated at a surplus, unusual for a listener-supported radio station.

Efforts to get a public radio station for San Antonio stretched as far back as 1974. On January 21 of that year, the San Antonio Community Radio Corporation, headed by Pleas J. McNeel, filed an application with the FCC for a station on 89.1 MHz. A competing application was received soon after from the Southwest Texas Public Broadcasting Council, the Austin-based owner of KLRN (channel 9). Though that group withdrew its application three months later, a competing applicant again arose in October 1975: Yanaguana Radio Station, headed by Carlos Garcia. Though Yanaguana announced two months later it was joining forces with the San Antonio Community Radio bid, a formal settlement agreement between the parties was not filed with the FCC until August 1978, and the construction permit was granted October 23, 1979.

San Antonio Community Radio Corporation then won grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and began the process of seeking a studio and transmitter site. A general manager was hired in May 1980 with the intention of starting operations by the end of 1981. A broadly defined bilingual format was selected. After the call sign KAZZ was denied by the FCC at the petition of FM station KZZY, the station took the call sign KURU in January 1981. It secured studio space in a building owned by the San Antonio Museum Association on Jones Avenue.

The museum space deal, like virtually all the effort expended at this stage into putting KURU together, never went anywhere. The cobbled-together leadership had competing priorities for programming. Transmitter site negotiations failed; the heavy antenna needed for broadcasting a Class C, 100,000-watt signal limited options, and the Tower of the Americas was already full, forcing the station to contemplate building its own tower and finding a site in rapidly growing San Antonio. KURU managed to secure receiver equipment and lost it to the museum association in a payment dispute. In late 1983, the board ceased fundraising operations. Former board chair Frances Hill told the San Antonio Express-News that fundraising failed to occur "because the board got involved in personalities and other things instead of doing the job it was supposed to do".

In March 1984, San Antonio Community Radio experienced turnover on its board as San Francisco–based Western Community Bilingual Inc. (WCB) obtained control, filling 11 of the board's 21 seats. That September, the push to bring NPR to San Antonio was relaunched, with a new call sign, KSTX (for San Antonio, Texas), and a new board chair: Mary Alice Cisneros, wife of San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros. As in the KURU era, the proposed KSTX would be a bilingual station. This effort, too, stalled out amid a mix of technical and economic struggles. A San Antonio TV station objected to the proposed technical facility, a deal for tower space was scuttled by the sale of the station that owned the tower, and a deal the station had for space in a new San Antonio skyscraper fell apart when the building's owner went bankrupt. Funds that had been raised were diverted to paying for lawyers and engineers, all as a new round of grants and the construction permit were set to expire, and San Antonio remained the largest city in the nation without NPR.