Re: [IRCA] WTOP WTWP call change

S writes: "I can sort of understand why the old-timers might have counted call
changes as new loggings - in the thirties and forties, you could go a
whole year with perhaps a dozen or two dozen call changes, total. (I
would have been one bored 100000watts.com editor back then!)"

Another, more significant factor, as I recall from a conversation with Ernie Cooper and from reading ancient NRC DX Newses, that made a call-letter change a different station but did not count frequency changes was the wholesale shift on the broadcast band in 1941. Graveyard channels, for example, used to be 1200, 1210, 1310, 1370, 1420 and 1500.

(There were two East Coast stations on one of the graveyard channels that did not shift frequency, and remained 250-watt fulltimers on a regional channel. I'll leave it open as a pop quiz for the newtimers to pick up on those.)

Uhhh, I was only 6 when the wholesale frequency shift occurred, and didn't start DX'ing until I was 12.

It used to be, back before the consultants told us that the average listener's attention span was too short to remember all four letters in a station's call, that the call letters were the station's primary identity. Now that most stations hide their call letters (along with the city of license) in a mumbled jumble somewhere near the top of the hour, I don't understand the need to change call letters so often.

Oh, I suppose I should correct the above paragraph to read "to short to remember all three letters" because it was KQV that pioneered the non-ID name as "13-Q." Perhaps all U.S. stations should adopt a single call ... KLCD west of the Mississippi and WLCD east of the Mississippi, based upon the audience they seem to be seeking.

Q, the K