WCVT (101.7 Stowe, VT)

[Scott Fybush]

On 12/13/2011 12:29 AM, A Joseph Ross wrote:

> It occurs to me that those original FM calls must have caused a lot of
> trouble. If a station was on the same channel in Boston and in Buffalo,
> or Baltimore, or Binghamton, or ..., they would have had to have the
> same callsign. Would the FCC do that or would they avoid certain
> frequency assignments in order to avoid duplication of calls? If FM had
> grown more than it did in those days, that could have been a
> considerable headache.

It was a terrible system, really - imagine the poor New Yorkers trying 
to differentiate between "W67NY" and "W71NY" and "W75NY"!

There were at least some two-letter suffixes - Binghamton was W49BN, for 
instance, but the system would not have scaled up very well, for sure.

And getting back to Garrett's earlier note about the TV calls, I think 
the start of the "-TV" suffix can be dated to 1947. Everything before 
that (which was only eight or so stations) had a separate four-letter 
call (WNBT, WCBW, WNBW, WABD, etc.); February 1947 marked the start of 
KSD-TV in St. Louis, followed quickly by WGN-TV, KOB-TV, WFIL-TV and 
others.

s