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FCC Call Letter Question

But Tom's point is still worth making: when a four-letter base call (e.g. "WRRR") is in use in one broadcast service, whether suffixed or not, it can't be used in another broadcast service, whether suffixed or not, without the permission of the existing user of the base call.

In other words, while "WRRRFM" and "WRRR" are different calls, the Rockford station could not have returned to the "WRRR" calls without the permission of the licensee of "WRRRFM." (And until the rules changed in the eighties, the Rockford station could not have returned to the "WRRR" calls at all, so long as "WRRRFM" was being used by a different licensee in a different market.)

Or to use another example that's popped up in this thread: even if NBC changes the callsign of channel 4 in New York from "WNBC" back to "WNBCTV," anyone else wishing to call their radio station "WNBC" or "WNBCFM" or "WNBCLP" would still need the permission of NBC to do so.

An interesting sidenote to this: it's my understanding that the decision about whether another party can reuse a base callsign rests with whichever party has controlled that base callsign the longest. So if I want to call my new station "WABCFM" or "WABCLP," I'm pretty sure I need to be asking Disney for that permission, since it's controlled "WABCTV" since 1986, while Citadel has only owned "WABC" for the last couple of years. (I may be wrong about this; it may actually rest with whichever license has carried that base call the longest, in which case the WABC situation gets massively confusing, since I'm pretty sure WJZ and WJZTV became WABC and WABCTV, respectively, on the very same day in 1953.)
 
Scott Fybush said:
But Tom's point is still worth making: when a four-letter base call (e.g. "WRRR") is in use in one broadcast service, whether suffixed or not, it can't be used in another broadcast service, whether suffixed or not, without the permission of the existing user of the base call.

In other words, while "WRRRFM" and "WRRR" are different calls, the Rockford station could not have returned to the "WRRR" calls without the permission of the licensee of "WRRRFM." (And until the rules changed in the eighties, the Rockford station could not have returned to the "WRRR" calls at all, so long as "WRRRFM" was being used by a different licensee in a different market.)

Or to use another example that's popped up in this thread: even if NBC changes the callsign of channel 4 in New York from "WNBC" back to "WNBCTV," anyone else wishing to call their radio station "WNBC" or "WNBCFM" or "WNBCLP" would still need the permission of NBC to do so.

An interesting sidenote to this: it's my understanding that the decision about whether another party can reuse a base callsign rests with whichever party has controlled that base callsign the longest. So if I want to call my new station "WABCFM" or "WABCLP," I'm pretty sure I need to be asking Disney for that permission, since it's controlled "WABCTV" since 1986, while Citadel has only owned "WABC" for the last couple of years. (I may be wrong about this; it may actually rest with whichever license has carried that base call the longest, in which case the WABC situation gets massively confusing, since I'm pretty sure WJZ and WJZTV became WABC and WABCTV, respectively, on the very same day in 1953.)
Click to expand...

Absolutely agreed.

My point was that if Tom's station were WRRR instead of WRRR-FM, they would not have been able to grant permission for the Illinois station to use the WRRR calls.
 
w9wi said:
My point was that if Tom's station were WRRR instead of WRRR-FM, they would not have been able to grant permission for the Illinois station to use the WRRR calls.
Click to expand...

Technically true...but hardly an insurmountable obstacle. I've seen plenty of cases like this where the FM or TV station in question pays the $65 (or arranges to have it paid) to change its calls from WXXX to WXXXFM to allow another station to become WXXX.
 
Or substantially more. A Lutheran church here in the Midwest had a low power FM with a call that a major chain wanted to use down south--the chain called me because I did the original app. Suggested to the pastor that a fair trade might be some surplus equipment from the big folks. Never did hear what they got, but both sides seemed happy with the deal.
 
TomT said:
Or substantially more. A Lutheran church here in the Midwest had a low power FM with a call that a major chain wanted to use down south--the chain called me because I did the original app. Suggested to the pastor that a fair trade might be some surplus equipment from the big folks. Never did hear what they got, but both sides seemed happy with the deal.
Click to expand...

Well, yeah - my $65 reference was to the FCC's filing fee for the callsign change. Whatever two parties choose to negotiate to get to that point is, of course, up to them. (One of the more famous cases, of course, was Ted Turner's quest to pry the "WTBS" callsign from the MIT student station in Cambridge, which landed a new transmitter in exchange for its agreement to become WMBR.)
 
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