I've been seeing stations like WBZ in Boston, WSB in Atlanta, and such which are stations that has three letter calls and I was wondering has the state of Florida ever had a station with three letter calls regardless if it was in Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville or anywhere else in the state?
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Has Florida ever had a station with a three letter calls?
- Thread starter edward1978
- Start date
edward1978 said:
No. The first radio station in Florida was WCAN Jacksonville, which (allegedly) had a brief existence beginning in May 1922. I believe the oldest Florida station still on the air is WDAE Tampa, which also started in May '22. They also claim to be the first station in Florida. This may be true, since I can find no evidence that WCAN actually went on the air, nor can I find a shutdown date or call letter change for them. But they received their license several days before WDAE.
Call letter assignments beginning in April 1922 were WAAB-WAAZ (3 identical letters were not allowed), followed by WBAA-WBAZ, WCAA-WCAZ, WDAA-WDAZ, etc.
Three-letter calls were still being assigned through 1930, if requested, and a very few were assigned or reassigned after that. KHJ Los Angeles got its callsign back after being KKHJ for a long time - IIRC, it had something to do with the Spanish pronunciation of KKHJ. WJZ, originally in NYC, was taken by Westinghouse for Channel 13 in Baltimore (as WJZ-TV, as was Channel 7 in NYC originally) since they were the original, pre-ABC owner of the callsign. I think CBS also uses WJZ for its radio stations there, but that's been a recent development.
Here is a list of all 3-letter calls that were/are assigned to broadcasters.
...the calls WCAN eventually got put onto a TV station from 1953 to 1955, WCAN-TV/25 Milwaukee, that city's first primary affiliate of CBS (WTMJ-TV/3, later 4, had been a secondary affiliate of CBS prior to 1953)...KeithE4 said:
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Not to derail the thread, but once the Miami Herald's "Action Line" had the question asked, "What was the first radio station in Florida?" to which the answer was something like "That's an argument that may never be settled." Both WDAE and Miami's WQAM (claiming to have signed on in 1921 as WFAW, as I think I heard a QAM jock or newsman say on air in the 70s) say they were the first. Honest, I had never heard of WCAN, and it's outta business, but apparently there are not enough sufficient documents to prove that any of them were first.
FL was not heavily populated enough to either get a 3-letter call OR one of the coveted Class I-A clear channel (small c, ha ha) AM's. Then, air conditioning came along...
(Seriously I can't imagine living here 12 months a year without it.)
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FL was not heavily populated enough to either get a 3-letter call OR one of the coveted Class I-A clear channel (small c, ha ha) AM's. Then, air conditioning came along...
(Seriously I can't imagine living here 12 months a year without it.)cd
Likely true about FL and the old Class I-A clears, not enough population back in the day. But with "three-toes" that wasn't the case...case in point: KMA, Shenandoah IA, population in the 20s probably not more than 7000, and ten miles east of there was KSO, Clarinda IA about the same size.
KSO moved to Des Moines, changed to KGGO in the 80s which was KSO's FM sister, then in the early 00s became KXNO. KMA remains in Shenandoah, still owned by descendants of nursery and seed man Earl May.
(TMI mode on: KMA wasn't even the first station in Shenandoah, that honor went to Earl May's competitor in the nursery and seed biz Henry Field, with his KFNF, which is now a Family Radio repeater as KYFR. TMI mode off)
KSO moved to Des Moines, changed to KGGO in the 80s which was KSO's FM sister, then in the early 00s became KXNO. KMA remains in Shenandoah, still owned by descendants of nursery and seed man Earl May.
(TMI mode on: KMA wasn't even the first station in Shenandoah, that honor went to Earl May's competitor in the nursery and seed biz Henry Field, with his KFNF, which is now a Family Radio repeater as KYFR. TMI mode off)
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