There’s a local UPN station with the call letters WGSA. Whenever they show their logo (on the half hour) there’s a list of towns they service. Each town, however, has different call letters. For example: W39BV.
What is the meaning of this?
Usually, those other letters are for retransmitters. Fr’instance, here in Springfield, our CBS programming comes from a Champaign televison station, WCIA/Channel 3. They also have a retransmitter here in Springfield, which has different call letters and broadcasts on UHF channel 49. I’m sure the FCC requires these towers be assigned call letters because they’re technically still broadcasting signal.
They’re UHF repeaters. Very common out west, but still many in the east, as per your W* example. If you live in West Bupkiss Montana and the nearest big city is more than 50 miles away, you get TV off of these instead. Some stations have had upto a dozen scattered around in places I’ve been.
As others noted, W39BV is a translator that rebroadcasts WGSA’s signal. The 39 means it broadcasts on TV channel 39. On each channel the Federal Communications Commission has been working sequentially through the alphabet, starting with AA, for the trailing letters in the callsign – thus BV means it approximately the 48th station assigned to this channel in the east.
Free-standing low-power TV stations originally were assigned the same kinds of calls, but lately the FCC has let them use regular calls with -LP and -CA extensions, e.g. WAAA-LP or KZZZ-CA. Also, TV stations are beginning to simulcast over their new Digital TV assignments, and in that case the callsign has a -DT extension, e.g. WGSA’s Digital TV twin would be WGSA-DT.
There are also translators that relay FM station signals. In the U.S., the FM band consists of 101 channels from 87.9 to 107.9, which are designated as channels 200 to 300. Thus, a translator with the callsign of W275AD operates east of the Mississippi, on a frequency of 102.9.
Thanks for the info!