Whats with US radio stations and these abbreviations?

I think there's some standard where they have four letters and (west or east of the Mississippi) they start with K and (west or east of the Mississippi) they start with W. I never remember which is which 'cause last time I paid attention to this stuff I lived right on the banks of the Mississippi (OK, close enough) and we got both K--- and W--- stations.

Oh I know, WKRP Cincinnati, W must be East. (Yeah, that makes sense... not.)

Here we go:

http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/statid.html

Yup, that's it. W in the east, K in the west.

I believe I have come across some stations with three letters, though, like WOR in New York.

Also, some radio stations do change their letters to denote the programming, like WFAN in New York is a sports station.

Soz is basically on the right track. All licensed radio stations in the US sre identified by "call letters." Traditionally, all stations operating East of the Mississippi River begin with a W, west of the river with a K (there is at least one exception, but I've now forgotten the story behind that). Usually it's four letters and the choice of what those letters will be rests with the station management, except that, of course, you can't choose a set of letters that are already in use by some other station. (There's at least one exception to the four-letter tradition that I know of -- WBZ in Boston, an all-news station.) Station owners will choose their call letters for various and sundry reasons, but they're usually some sort of acronym. KUSC in Los Angeles, for example, is owned and operated by the University of Southern California. Get it? WGBH in Boston gets that GBH from the Great Blue Hills, a low mountain range southwest of the city where the station has its main transmitter located. A country-and-western music station in West Virginia used to have the call-letters of WWVA. They were loacted in Wheeling, West Virginia. It was one of the strongest signals on the East Coast and I used to be able to pick up WWVA driving around the New Eng;and states, a distance of at least 500 miles. This was long before there were any man-made satellites, mind you.

What might get you even more confused, nimh, is that those four call-letters are usually followed by two more -- either "AM" or "FM", depending on which broadcast band you're listening on.

Any other questions? Feel free to ask.

Andy

I hadn't seen KC's posts yet as I was typing my reply. Had forgotten about WOR. Probably there are others, too.

For some reason, San Antonio Texas has WOAI. I heard the reason once, but have long since forgotten.

Thanks for the info, guys, and Soz.

I'm still a bit puzzled about the rationale though. I understand that there must be some technical identifier - but - well, in Soz's link it's implied that this is basically an international system, that they just have to comply to:


But neither in Holland nor in Hungary do radio stations carry names that consist of abbrevations, or start with a common letter. The Dutch public radio stations used to simply be called "Hilversum 1" through 5; later, Radio 1 through 5; whereas commercial stations (eg, Kink FM, Radio Veronica, FunX) and local stations (eg, Radio West, Radio M, Radio Rijnmond) have carried all kinds of names. Same here in Hungary (Sztar FM, Slager Radio, Juventus Radio, etc).

From Soz's link.


With the advent of FM and TV in 1941, new call signs for all such stations were not assigned. Rather, since many FM and TV stations were operated by the same AM licensee at the same license area, the general practice was for the associated FM or TV station to simply add "-FM" or "-TV", to the call sign of the co-owned AM station. International Radio Regulations do not require the use of call signs by broadcast stations if some other suitable means of identification is employed. For example, many foreign stations identify by announcing, "The Voice of ... "or "Radio..."

What nimh says - that's common all over Europe.