Broadcast Call Letters?

[whitetho]

There has never been a station officially assigned the call letters “WKRP” in the Salt Lake City area, for the simple reason that there has never been a broadcast station assigned a W— callsign in the state of Utah. (According to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s Call Sign Query page, the only station currently assigned WKRP is a low-power TV station in Washington, DC, WKRP-LP).

The FCC is however very lax about what stations can use as slogans. Thus, a station is allowed to refer to itself as “WKRP” hundreds of times an hour if it wants, even if that isn’t its officially assigned call. The station is also, however, supposed to announce its real callsign, followed by its community of licence, each hour near the top of the hour. In cases where stations don’t want you to know what that is, they usually will sneak in the “legal ID” announcement very quickly and quietly about 5-10 minutes before the hour, between two commercials, in the middle of a big block of commercials, possibly drowned out by sound effects, at a time when they hope people aren’t listening. (saltlakeradio.com has a good list of the radio stations in the Salt Lake City area, including their real call letters.)

BigStar303: more information than your ever wanted to know about three-letter callsigns is located at Mystique of the Three-letter Callsigns and Three-letter Roll Call.

Quasimodem: The FCC will not assign the same callsign to more than one station in the same service. But it is willing to assign the same (base) call to one each of an AM, FM, regular TV, and low-power TV station. (The FM, TV, and LPTV stations will normally have -FM, -TV and -LP or -CA suffixes in addition to the “base call”, e.g. WMUR-TV and WMUR-LP, etc.) Also, if a station is already using a particular call, other stations have to first get its permission to use the same base call.

By the way, in 1987 the FCC largely deregulated its call letter standards, and no longer reviews whether they are appropriate or not–it will assign any currently unused calls. If another station claims a new call is too close to the ones they are using, they are free to take that station to court under trademark infringement. If people think a call letter grant is obscene, they also take the station to court, and claim its call violates the “community standards” rule.

[Hometownboy]

Thanks to FunkDaddy for the update on the “V” calls. I will go home tonight and dig through my box of radio effluvia for copies of the letters I received when I wrote, which would be sometime before 1986, just to check what they said.

And to further BigStar303 about three letter calls, there used to be a pretty good prestiege attached to them among broadcasters, as they indicated the station was one of the pioneers. Can’t remember the year that they stopped granting them, but by the last time I had access to a broadcasting yearbook, there were only 50 or so left in the US. In Portland, OR there is a case of a TV station (KGW) that inherited the call from the sister radio station. Said radio was sold and had to change calls, and so another radio 3-letter-call left the air.

For real trivia buffs, Seattle had the greatest number of remaining 3-letter-calls back in the 80s with five of them (KJR, KTW, KVI, KXA and KOL) though several of them are gone as well now.

Quasimodern I’m not familiar with the situation these days, but in the past, it would be possible for a station to apply for a set of call letters in use if they knew that the other station was going to relinquish them. But unless things have changed drastically since, there would under no circumstances be the same call letters issued to two stations unless they were AM & FM or TV in the same city and owned by the same people.

It’s also hard to predict what the FCC will allow. For years they wouldn’t let the letters “USA” be used. I believe they considered them an “unfair advantage,” though they ultimately relented and I believe there is a WUSA TV in Washington DC and a KUSA in Denver. IIRC, both of them are on Channel 9 and both are owned by Gannett, the newspaper and broadcast conglomerate.

[Hometownboy]

Nearly a simulpost with whitetho whose knowledge is clearly more recent than mine. Great answers and thanks!

[Tamex]

*Originally posted by msrobyn *
**There’s also WFAA-TV in Dallas and WBAP-AM in Dallas, as well.

An interesting situation exists in the Twin Cities because the Mississippi cuts right through the area. Most stations start with a K, even the stations that are in St. Paul (east of the river). A notable exception is WLOL-FM, that recently took that call sign after a format change. Seems WLOL has been a fixture in the Twin Cities for so long that the FCC allowed it.

Robin **

On websites that I have seen devoted to this subject, they refuse even to deal with K/W exceptions in Minnesota and Louisiana because there are so many of them.

WLOL=Land Of Lakes.

[Some_Guy]

Pardon me, just passing through (I really have almost no knowledge of callsigns, so I’m pretty much going to sit back in awe of the various knowledgeable folks here).

However, I wanted to mention an interesting callsign that nobody has brought up yet: **WSB[/], assigned to one of the oldest commercial (AM) radio stations in the country, as well as to one of the first television stations in the south period (they are both owned by the same company, and both operate out of the same area, although WSB radio has one heck of a transmitter- I’ve picked it up in Ohio. In addition to being interesting in those ways, it occasionally comes up in trivia contests, because most people don’t realize that it was originally concieved as an acronym: Welcome South, Brother.

[whitetho]

Over the years, the federal government has generally let stations request special callsigns if they want, but if the station doesn’t have any preference, they are assigned callsigns at random. In many cases, the stations have later come up with slogans to go with these assigned calls.

Jeff Miller has a page, Requested Broadcast Calls of the 1920s, which lists all the U.S. callsigns which were specially requested by the stations in that decade. However, three of the 1920s stations talked about so far in this thread – WMBD, KFKB, and WSB – are not included in this list, because in all three cases the call was assigned at random, and the stations later came up the slogan to match the call.

[Flymaster]

Re: East/west of the Missippippi exceptions, isn’t there a KDKA Pittsburgh?

Also, as for stations still using their original 3 letters, WBZ Boston is still just WBZ.

And as for the list of wind related call letters, you can add WNDS TV Derry, NH, “The Winds of New England.”

[AWB]

My college radio station was KMSA, Mesa State College in Grand Jct., CO, which played alternative rock. (Their playlist explicitly excluded any Billboard Top 40 or MTV Rotation songs.)

Obviously MSA was for Mesa, but we always said it stood for “Kiss My Sweet Ass”. College kids! :rolleyes: