Hacker News Reader

Comment by gmtplus8 | Hacker News Reader

Non-USA resident here. Can someone explain all the four-letter news station names to me? Why not brand them with something more memorable / locally nuanced?

View on HN

The FCC licenses are given with those station identifying letters and there’s a requirement to broadcast the station ID periodically. Many stations have an additional brand (often <affiliate city> “Fox Boston”), but they still have to use the FCC ID as well.

One of my favorite station IDs was an independent local analog UHF channel 56 with call letters WLVI. I heard those letters for years before I realized it was 56 in Roman numerals.

This is why it became common; the FCC requires you say the station ID once every period of time (10? 30?) so people became very used to hearing it.

You can think of it as the "smash like and subscribe" of the radio days!

Station ID is every hour. Also you have to say it in a very specific format: Call letters, city; or call letters, frequency, city. No additional words in between: “WKRP in Cincinnati” would be invalid.

TV stations are allowed to do it visually. When I was young it was common to see it as a full screen ID in between shows (often with a quick weather report, “time and temperature”). Later most stations I saw quit that and just put it as a bug at the bottom of the screen over top of the show.

Including your frequency is especially effective for customer retention - I still remember the MW frequency of one of my favorite radio stations from my youth because it was included in the name, even though I listened to it via satellite ("Virgin 1215" - apparently it's called Absolute Radio now, and medium wave transmissions were discontinued on 20 January 2023: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Radio).

I always wondered why they chose "WKRP" and whether it had to do with spelling "crap" in a censor-evading manner.

Fun fact. My college radio station had the station ID WTBS (technology broadcasting system or something like that). When Ted Turner was spearheading one of the fairly early major cable TV stations, he bought the ID for what I imagine was a lot of money for a college radio station for the Turner Broadcasting System or something similar.

>One of my favorite station IDs was an independent local analog UHF channel 56 with call letters WLVI.

Bangor, ME has an ABC affiliate WVII broadcasting on VHF channel 7.

Rochester NY has WXXI for a PBS station on channel 21. It is also curiously reused as the call sign on local AM and FM NPR radio stations. For whatever reason that is allowed.

The FCC generally allows stations that share ownership to use the same callsign for TV, FM, and AM. Not always in the same area either; KCBS-AM is in San Francisco, while KCBS-FM and KCBS-TV are in Los Angeles. Additionally, stations are allowed to keep their call sign when ownership changes, so even though KCBS-FM and AM are no longer owned by the owners of KCBS-FM, they have chosen to keep the same call signs.

My absolute favorite is KNOW -- the news channel of the Minnesota Public Radio network. I think it's just about as perfect as you can get for a news channel.

My favorite is WACO (Texas), the only radio station whose call letters are also its location.

Incorrect - there is also KCMO:

"KCMO (710 kHz) is a commercial AM radio station licensed to Kansas City, Missouri ..."

The city's name is Kansas City, not Kcmo. There may be any number of stations like that, but there's only one Waco.

They are from the radio call signs - K or W is the first for almost all of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_call_signs

The other thing that might not be obvious to non-residents is that K is for West of the Mississippi, and W is for East.

It must be weird to live near the Mississippi and get a mix of K and W station call signs!

In St. Louis most stations are K but there are a few Ws.

I knew this was the general rule, but also knew about KDKA-Pittsburgh (a very old station, east of the Mississippi). In looking into why that one got a K, I found this that might be interesting to people reading this far down this subthread: https://archive.is/HpUc3

For a W west of the Mississippi a good example is WACO in Waco, Texas, which is also one of only 3 stations whose callsign is the name of their city. (The other two are WARE in Ware, Massachusetts, and WISE in Wise, Virginia).

W is for East. What a country!

Originally W was supposed to be for the West side, but there was a bureaucratic screw up and they were switched.

As for why K and W, nobody is sure why those two letters, but it might be related to Morse code.

Can confirm in New Orleans WYLD has their transmitter in Algiers on the west side of the river and I’m sure that situation applies to other stations can’t recall any Ks around here

This Wikipedia article provides a good overview:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_signs_in_the_United_State...

they are using their radio call sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_signs_in_the_United_State...

Well they are memorable for the people that live in the area—at least that was the case when broadcast TV/radio was important. There really wasn't a need for them to be decipherable to outsiders since historically they would be outside of the broadcast range.

They all come with cute little jingles of people singing the letters!

KOME:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rMhtoniG82o

(I wish I could find a recording of the one that went;: "Don't touch that dial!!! You've got KOME on your radio." or "The KOME spot on your FM dial.")

Vintage WWDC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPybevwjinM

I still know wwdc is dc101. Impressionable youth and all that.

Other posts covered the details. Similar to the airport codes, just national instead of international...

WRC-TV - NBC Washington

similar to...

KIAD - Dulles International

The history of these channels is old, dating back to radio times before TV.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com