City of license Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Licensing and on-air identity=== While becoming less meaningful over the decades, stations are still required to post a [[public file]] somewhere within 25 miles of the city, and to cover the entire city with a local [[Signaling (telecommunications)|signal]]. In the United States, a station's [[transmitter]] must be located so that it can provide a strong signal over nearly all of its "principal community" (5 mV/m or stronger at night for AM stations, 70 dbuV for FM, 35 dbu for DTV channels 2–6, 43 dbu for channels 7-13 and 48 dbu for channels 14+), even if it primarily serves another city.<ref>FCC Rules §73.24, §73.315 and §73.625</ref> For example, American television station [[WTTV]] primarily serves [[Indianapolis]]; however, the transmitter is located farther south than the other stations in that city because it is licensed to [[Bloomington, Indiana|Bloomington]], 50 miles south of Indianapolis (it maintains a satellite station, WTTK, licensed to [[Kokomo, Indiana]], but in the digital age, WTTK is for all intents and purposes the station's main signal, transmitting from the traditional Indianapolis transmitter site). In some cases, such as [[Jeannette, Pennsylvania]]-licensed [[WPKD-TV]] 19, the FCC has waived this requirement; the station claimed that retaining an existing transmitter site 25.6 miles southeast of its new community of license of Jeannette would be in compliance with the commission's minimum distance separation requirements (avoiding interference to [[co-channel interference|co-channel]] [[WOIO]] 19 [[Shaker Heights, Ohio|Shaker Heights]]).<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Mass_Media/Orders/1997/da971503.txt|title=MM Docket No. 97-96 Table of Allotments, RM-8756 TV Broadcast Stations (Johnstown and Jeannette, Pennsylvania)}}</ref> Another extreme example of a station's transmitter located far from the city of license is the FM station [[KPNT]], formerly licensed to [[Ste. Genevieve, Missouri]], and transmitting from [[Hillsboro, Missouri|Hillsboro]], but serving the [[St. Louis]] and [[Metro East]] market to the north. In 2015, the station was allowed by the FCC to move their city of license to [[Collinsville, Illinois]], and have a transmitter in St. Louis proper with a power decrease. FCC regulations also require stations at least once an hour to state the station's call letters, followed by the city of license. However, the FCC has no restrictions on additional names after the city of license, so many stations afterwards add the nearest large city. For example, CBS affiliate [[WOIO]] is licensed to [[Shaker Heights, Ohio|Shaker Heights]], a suburb of [[Cleveland]], and thus identifies as "WOIO Shaker Heights-Cleveland." Similarly, northern [[New York (state)|New York]]'s [[WWNY-TV]] (also a CBS affiliate) identifies as "WWNY-TV [[North American broadcast television frequencies|7]] [[Carthage, New York|Carthage]]-[[Watertown, New York|Watertown]]" as a historical artifact; the original broadcasts originated from [[Champion, New York|Champion Hill]] in 1954 so the license still reflects this tiny location.{{efn|It is possible for two stations to have the same studio location and transmit from the same mast at the same site, but be licensed to different communities; [[WWNY-TV]] and [[WNYF-CD]] (Carthage and Watertown NY, respectively) are one example.}} If the station is licensed in the primary city served, on occasion the station will list a second city or region next to it. For example, the [[Tampa Bay]] region's Fox owned-and-operated station [[WTVT]] is licensed to [[Tampa, Florida]], its primary city, but identifies on-air as "WTVT Tampa/[[St. Petersburg, Florida|St. Petersburg]]", as St. Petersburg is another major city in the market. To encompass [[Appleton, Wisconsin|Appleton]] and the smaller cities clustered around the [[Fox River (Green Bay tributary)|Fox River]] southwest of [[Green Bay, Wisconsin]], stations in the Green Bay–Appleton area identify as "Green Bay/[[Fox Cities]]" (e.g. "[[WBAY-TV]], Green Bay/Fox Cities"); Green Bay-licensed stations thus still carry an official identification, while providing the ability for stations licensed to other places in the region to officially prefix their name before the mention of "Green Bay/Fox Cities". There is no longer a requirement to carry [[program (management)|program]]s relevant to the particular community, {{efn|There are a few rare exceptions, even in the US. US low-power FM stations were originally introduced with far more stringent broadcast localism requirements than any other station class. Broadcast regulators may also add extra restrictions to one specific licence: [[WNET|13 Newark]] was only allowed to move its facilities to [[New York City]] on condition that the licence, station ID and 2.5 hours/week of community programming remain with [[New Jersey]]. That local programming remains today. Non-US stations are subject to their own nation's rules — a full-power rebroadcaster is easier to licence in Canada or México, but an originating station in Canada must gather local news.}} or even necessarily to operate or transmit from that community. Accordingly, stations licensed to smaller communities in major [[metropolitan area|metropolitan markets]] often target programming toward the entire market rather than the official home community, and often move their studio facilities to the larger urban centre as well. For instance, the Canadian radio station [[CFNY-FM]] is officially licensed to [[Brampton|Brampton, Ontario]], although its studio and transmitter facilities are located in downtown [[Toronto]]. This may, at times, lead to confusion — while media directories normally list broadcast stations by their legal community of license, audiences often disregard (or may even be entirely unaware of) the distinction. For instance, for a short time while resolving a license conflict and ownership transaction in 1989, the current day [[KCAL-TV]] in [[Los Angeles]] was licensed to the little-known southeast suburb of [[Norwalk, California]], with the station's identifications at the time only vocally mentioning the temporary city of license in a rushed form, with Norwalk barely receiving any visual mention on the station; at no time were any station assets actually based in Norwalk, nor was public affairs or news programming adjusted to become Norwalk-centric over that of Los Angeles and [[Southern California]]. The station returned to its Los Angeles city of license after the transaction was complete. Often, a station will keep a tiny outlying community in its licensing and on-air identity long after the original rationale for choosing that location is no longer truly applicable. [[Sneedville, Tennessee]], as city of license for PBS member station [[WETP-TV]] originally made sense as a compromise location to serve both [[Knoxville, Tennessee|Knoxville]] and the [[Tri-Cities, Tennessee|Tri-Cities of Tennessee and Virginia]] on VHF channel 2. It met the minimum distance requirements to two other channel 2 stations in the region, [[WKRN]] in [[Nashville]] and [[WSB-TV]] in [[Atlanta]]. This became less important after full-power UHF satellite [[WKOP-TV]] signed on in Knoxville, and irrelevant once the [[Digital television transition in the United States|2003-09 DTV transition]] and [[2016 United States wireless spectrum auction#Repacking|2016-21 repack]] moved WETP's main signal to physical channel UHF 24. Nonetheless, broadcasters and regulatory authorities are more likely to retain the original city of license, rather than bring unwanted scrutiny for taking away a small community's only station, which may be a mark of [[Boosterism|civic pride]], only to move it to some larger center which already has multiple stations. Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page