Seen in pre-Internet era movies. Do you guys still have local radio stations named like KWJC or similar that’s 4 letters? What are those initialisms stand for – state and county, I guess? Are those stations FM or AM?

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  3. That is their registered call sign with the FCC. 

    Broadcast radio and Television stations both have them. With just a couple of exceptions, if it starts with a ‘W’ its East of the Mississippi River and if its a ‘K’ its West of the Mississippi River. 

    E.G. KVWN from San Diego, Channel 4 News with Ron Burgundy. 

  4. Yes they are still ubiquitous and the letters have something to do with FCC regulations, I have no idea beyond that. The station I occasionally listen to on FM is WCYO “The Coyote” on 100.7

    Edit: that station even has a Wikipedia page

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WCYO

  5. > Do you guys still have local radio stations named like KWJC or similar that’s 4 letters?

    Sometimes 3, sometimes 4. Broadcast TV stations have them too

    > What are those initialisms stand for – state and county, I guess?

    Rarely. An initial W means east of the Mississippi River, K means west.

    The rest can mean anything, or be totally arbitrary. WSM 650 AM out of Nashville which aired the Grand Ole Opry stands for “We Shield Millions,” the slogan of the life insurance company which once owned the station. WGN stood for “Worlds Greatest Newspaper” because it was owned by the Chicago Tribune.

    KTLA stands for “television Los Angeles”

    > Are those stations FM or AM?

    AM, FM, or television. The ownership of the station could purchase a different broadcast license and transmit on a different frequency but they’d still be WGN.

  6. The K is west of the Mississippi and the W is east. There are a few exceptions. Same for tv. Generally the rest of the letters can be anything appropriate to match the station’s genre or a local condition. For California,  one of the music stations that was popular before it was sold was known as KFOG.  The station originated in San Francisco which gets lots of Fog.

    The Sacramento Kings basketball team has their radio games on KHTK which stands for “The Home of the Kings.” The FCC doesn’t allow stations to have the same call letters. Some stations just advertise their frequency and genre and ignore the call letters.

  7. K is for west of the Mississippi, W is east.

    The initials can be random, but can also be bought for specific combinations. On the other hand, some are back formed.

    Some examples I know:

    WGN (Chicago) World’s Greatest Newspaper

    WNYC (New York City)

    WBCN (Boston Concert Network)

    WGBH (Great Blue Hills- where their tower is, near Boston)

    WFNX (Sponsored by the *Boston Phoenix*)

    WRKO (named for the old Roderick Keith Organization, the same RKO as in RKO Pictures back in the day)

    WBUR (Boston University Radio)

  8. As others have said, those are their assigned letters from the Federal Communications Commission. It’s always been standard here for stations to identify themselves by those letters ever since the 1920s when radio started in earnest. Everybody in the areas they broadcast knows what they are and what station they stand for.

    The only thing that’s meaningful is the first letter, which as people have said, are almost exclusively W’s east of the Mississippi River and K’s west of the Mississippi River. Other than that the letters don’t necessarily mean anything and if they have a meaning they are chosen by the stations themselves. KSTP uses the abbreviation for the city of St Paul. We had a station called KTTC where I grew up and that stood for Tri-State Television Coverage because it broadcast to three different states. Oftentimes they don’t really mean anything. Most are four letters but a few are three letters. Those tend to be older stations that got their letters way back many decades ago.

    All radio stations and TV stations have them, AM/FM and everything else. They correspond with international agreements on assigning identifiers to broadcasters. Your country has them, too, whether you use them publicly or not. It’s all part of an international agreement. I used to live in Liberia in West Africa and all the stations there started with EL.

    Over here they’re so common that they are basically treated like names. “What’s your favorite station?” “I usually listen to WRTA.” There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of individual radio and TV stations in the US. Using that system keeps them separated and identifiable individually.

    Broadcasters in the United States are required to identify themselves.

    >Stations must air identification announcements when they sign on and off for the day. They also must broadcast these announcements every hour, as close to the start of the hour as possible, at a natural programming break.

    Added:
    >There are over 15,445 radio stations in the U.S., all competing for a piece of this massive market.

    >According to a Federal Communications Commission report dated March 21, 2021, there are a total of 1,758 broadcast television stations in the United States.

  9. It’s a thing that is still a thing. The letters don’t really mean anything, it’s regulatory. It’s not just radio, TV stations have the same 3/4 letter rules. All broadcasters have a station ID: TV, FM, AM, everyone. Even Ham operators, though the station names are longer there to accomodate more people.

    3 letter stations were grandfathered in way back. Anyone with 3 letters has had the license for a long time.

    Stations will try to get something that they can make recognizable. For example, we have in the Reno, Nevada area:

    * KUNR (Radio, Univiersity of Nevada, Reno)
    * KTVN (TV, KTNV was already taken)
    * KREN (TV)
    * KRNV (TV)
    * KRNS (TV, spanish)
    * KNPB (TV, public broadcaster)
    * KDOT (radio, “K Dot” so going for easily rememberable/recognizable)
    * KOZZ (radio, classic rock, so maybe an Ozzie reference, but also easy to remember)
    * KRNO (radio, pop I think)
    * KNEV (radio, no idea)
    * KBUL (radio, country)
    * KRNV (radio, no idea)

    You can see a lot of NVs, Rs, RNs, etc trying to emphasis the locality, or KBUL evoke bulls/cowboys, and so forth. Lots of that kind of stuff, nearly half of broadcasters, I’d say. The rest are essentially random, or meaningful only to the owners.

    K is west of the Mississippi, W is east – with a few exceptions for stations grandfathered in before the rule was made. Again, very old stations.

  10. Yes, radio and TV. We’re east of the Mississippi River here in Michigan, so all of ours start with “W”: for example, WDIV is the local NBC TV affiliate, and WDET is the local National Public Radio affiliate.

    Canada uses a similar system, but their 4-letter call signs start with “C,” e.g., CBET is the Windsor, Ontario TV affiliate of the CBC.

  12. They would definitely continue to exist post-Internet. They are the call sign of the radio or TV station. All stations in the country must have a unique call sign. Theoretically this also applies worldwide, which is why in the USA they all start with K or W (other letters are reserved for other countries).

    If you told someone to tune in to radio station 99.7 FM, that would be different depending on where they were. But if you told them to tune in to WXAJ, which is 99.7 in the Springfield Illinois area, then there’s no ambiguity.

  14. Others have done a good job explaining the initials and I didn’t know that stuff but I do know that they are certainly still around today.

  15. Yes, radio call signs still exist. They all start with W east of the Mississippi River and K west of the river. All radio stations, AM and FM, have them.

  16. Then theres San Diego, a lot of their stations start with X, which is the letter Mexico uses for their stations.

    A lot of “San Diego” stations actually have their transmitters across the border in Tijuana to take advantage of Mexicos more powerful transmitters.

    You can hear some of these stations into the LA area

  17. Radio am and fm stations and local tv stations have those types of call letters. Sometimes a station will use some other branding for marketing but they all have those four letter names. 

    Sometimes the letters don’t mean anything. Sometimes they do. Like the cbs station in my town used to be on channel 6 and had WCIX. Then they switched to channel 4 and changed to WFOR. The channel that they switched with belonged to NBC. They were always called WTVJ whether they were on channel 4 or now 6. lol. 

  18. They’re local stations in the sense that they serve a regional audience but since the nineties they’re all owned by iHeartMedia

  19. The ITU assigns radio station prefixes to countries. The US has K and W. Canada has CF-CK and CY-CZ, and Canadian radio stations announce themselves this way (CHUM, CJOH, etc). Newfoundland also has VA-VG, which were assigned before it joined Canada.

    These identifiers refer to individual broadcast stations. For whatever reason, European radio is dominated by networks that broadcast the same signal from many stations, so commercial radio stations in Europe don’t tend to use callsigns.

    The reason for callsigns becomes more obvious when you think about aircraft. Each aircraft is also a radio station, with a license to transmit on aviation frequencies. Aircraft say their callsign with each transmission so you know who’s talking. In the US these are prefixed with N (which is assigned to the US just like K and W are), in Canada C (usually CF), in the UK G, in Germany DA-DR, and so on. The aircraft prefixes are a subset of the radio prefixes.

  22. Yeah. Pittsburgh has KDKA, WTAE, and WPXI. Those correspond to channels 2, 4, and 11.

  23. Those are called “call letters,” and the stations they identify are both AM and FM. TV stations use them too. What they stand for varies. Sometimes the FCC assisgns them, usually the station can choose. When the call letters are chosen, it could be for the owner: WABC, WNBC and WCBS in New York were the flaghsip stations of their respective networks (all of which are no longer in radio but the call letters remain). WTIC in Hartford, CT was Travelers Insurance Company. WLS in Chicago was “World’s Largest Store,” aka Sears Roebuck. Sears sold WLS to ABC, who kept the calls. WCFL was owned by the Chiacgo Federation Of Labor and was WLS’s biggest competitor.

    TV call letters can identify the channel number: KFOR, KTUU, WPVI (Philadelphia 6) and WCVB (Channel 5 Boston) are some clever examples. WJAC was started by the Johnstown (PA) Auto Company, a car dealer. In the ’70s, WJLA changed its calls from WMAL to the initials of its new owner, Joseph L. Albritton. Sometimes call letters stand for a slogan: WITF is “It’s Top Flight,” which checks with the higher-minded PBS programming it runs.

    Call letters start with W east of the Mississippi River, K to the west. Although there are exceptions, like KDKA in Pittsburgh, who signed on over a decade before the FCC was established, or WFAA in Dallas. And some pre-FCC stations retain their 3-letter calls, like KOB in Albuquerque, NM, WBZ in Boston, and KYW, which started in Chicago, moved to Philadelphia, then Cleveland and finally back to Philly, where it remains to this day. The Cleveland TV station is now WKYC.

  25. In Des Moines, IA, one of our stations is KDSM. The “DSM” is shorthand for Des Moines and is also used as our airport code.

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