In this letter to the editor, the author responds to Carl Dabelstein’s letter, “Use Your Call Letters!” Radio World welcomes letters to the editor on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.

With all due respect to Carl, acknowledging him both as a radio amateur and DXer, it’s my opinion that the station identification rule is obsolete, for the same reason that he is upset about the way most stations handle the same.

I understand why he would have an emotional attachment to the top of the hour legal station identification, but even the FCC itself relies on other means to identify stations in the field.  

Call letters are pretty much just a tracking method for the paperwork these days.

Some stations — including the one I program in Albuquerque, KRKE(AM)— do use its calls around the clock, but this is a case where we are running a classic hits format using the branding of what was the top-40 station in the market “back in the day”. 

But that’s not a reason to make their use mandatory, as Carl appears to suggest, throughout the hour.

Sorry, Carl, but out here in the real world, where we have had to adjust to the changing landscape with competition from non-broadcast platforms, making DXers happy is the least of our concerns.  

I’d be happy to do away with the legal ID just so there’s one less thing for me to worry about in terms of FCC compliance. 

— K.M. Richards, Van Nuys, Calif.

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In this letter to the editor, the author responds to our SmartBrief Tuesday trivia question on what the FCC considers as a legal top of the hour identification. If you aren’t subscribing to our free daily newsletter, you definitely should!

The SmartBrief trivia question this week and the example of WGTZ’s legal ID that mentions “Eaton Dayton alive” — which has been doing that TOH legal with that added verbiage for decades now — reminded me of how I buried a legal ID way back in 1978.

I was the program director at KAAP(AM/FM) in Santa Paula, Calif., in the Oxnard-Ventura market, just north of Los Angeles.  

The AM and FM simulcast most of the time, only breaking the AM away for California Angels baseball, Los Angeles Rams football and UCLA football and basketball, and some paid religious programming that followed the Sunday morning public affairs block.

But the owners hated our community of license, largely because Santa Paula was generally regarded as a small town centered around agriculture, mostly citrus and avocados. 

And our competitors would deride us as “that little Santa Paula station” to prospective advertisers.  

We had a Ventura post office box as our mailing address and a foreign exchange phone number which was a local call not only to Santa Paula but also to both Ventura and Oxnard.  

But that legal ID still stood out like a sore thumb. Until I got there.

Before KAAP-FM had even gotten on the air, the AM had been successful with the ill-fated NBC’s News and Information Service.

The owners kept some semblance of that after the simulcast was established post-NIS by continuing to do top of the hour news every hour, 24/7, with ABC Information and local news in both drive-times and noon, three-minute local newscasts the rest of the day and one-minute headlines from 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m.

So I “hid” the legal. For example:

“(time) at KAAP.  Ventura County weather:  (forecast)  Current area temperatures from KAAP AM & FM:  Santa Paula __ degrees, __ in Ventura, and in Oxnard __ degrees.  I’m (name), KAAP News.  Now more of Ventura County’s favorite music on FM 97 and AM 14, KAAP!”

And, we got the call letters four times over about 20 seconds. 

We even fooled the FCC field inspectors, which is another story from my chequered past.

— K.M. Richards, Van Nuys, Calif.

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