RadioActive wrote:

This isn't local, but it is very unusual.

I was very surprised to see a recent FCC decision that forces a radio station to be programmed by two different owners at two different times of the day. The case surrounds an outlet in Wisconsin that is being programmed by one company for a certain time of the day, followed by another for a scheduled number of hours. It's the result of a dispute between the two sides, which otherwise wasn't solvable.

But talk about the Wisdom of Solomon - they've literally divided the baby. 

It's a bit complicated and this story tries to explain it more clearly than I can ever manage, but one owner has been assigned the hours of 3 AM to 2:59 PM to broadcast. The other would-be owner can be on the air on the same frequency from 2:59 PM to 3 AM, when the original guy takes over and it starts all over again.

I'm not sure if there are two separate call letters involved in doing this, but I thought this kind of thing was eliminated a long time ago. Some here may remember the one closest to us, Channel 10 in Rochester, N.Y., which in its early days in the 50s, was a time shared station. When one owner was on the air, it was called WHEC. When the other took over, it became WVET.

I thought it couldn't happen anymore. But apparently, it can. As a listener, I'd find it all very confusing and I'm guessing neither side is going to be happy with the arrangement.

Looking at the channel guide, it shows CHCH, CKWS and CKCO as In dependent. I thought it was a requirement back then for all Canadian stations to be a CBC affilliate. CHCH eventually became independent in 1961. This guide is obviously pre November 1958 because there is no WKBW.

mace wrote:

Looking at the channel guide, it shows CHCH, CKWS and CKCO as In dependent. I thought it was a requirement back then for all Canadian stations to be a CBC affilliate. CHCH eventually became independent in 1961. This guide is obviously pre November 1958 because there is no WKBW.

The listings were from 1956.

I think my favourite part are the phone numbers for the stations, some of which don't even have seven digits. The one in Watertown, N.Y. is "410!" 

Shared-time stations have been part of the US regulatory scheme since the 1920s - in fact, if you go all the way back to 1922, everyone had to share a single wavelength (360 meters or about 833 kHz). 

Especially in NYC, shared-time was a way for many very small stations to share a limited number of available frequencies. From the 1920s into the 1940s/50s, there were several frequencies shared by as many as four stations, operating for a few hours at a time serving niche ethnic communities. 

Most of those shared-time AMs eventually consolidated, though a few hung on very late in the game - into the 21st century, there were two AM frequencies in Chicago (1240 and 1450) that still had shared-time operation.

And while nearly all of those have now gone away, shared time still remains one of the FCC's tools to resolve the occasional contested application situation that can't otherwise be decided. Non-commercial facilities can't be auctioned the way commercial channels are in the US, and if all other tie-breaker points are exhausted, the FCC still gives tied applicants a chance to either negotiate a share-time agreement or have one imposed on them.

There are also still a handful of share-time FMs that pre-date the current tiebreaker rules. In NYC, two universities applied for 89.1 in the 1960s, a frequency that was allocated for use by the UN but never implemented, and so NYU (WNYU) and Fairleigh Dickinson U in NJ (WFDU) still alternate shifts on the channel. WNYU operates on weeknights starting at 4 PM, while WFDU has the daytime and weekend hours.

These arrangements tend to come and go - in a lot of cases, after a few years one party either gives up or finds a different frequency to acquire, and the other party ends up with the channel for 24-hour use. We've seen this happen recently in Phoenix, among other places. 

I'm not THAT old (53) - so the share-time on WVET/WHEC was gone 11 years before I was born. Even the ID was coordinated, so, as you've noted, it was always the same "10" logo regardless of which TV station was operating. And they shared a common transmitter and antenna, so the signal never changed. 

The area where there was differentiation was local programming, which came from two separate studio facilities. WHEC's late news aired only three nights a week, for instance. I interviewed one of their newsmen many years later (Warren Doremus, who stayed with channel 10 into the 1990s) and he admitted it was very weird only having a newsroom certain nights out of the week. 

Incidentally, the WVET studios at 17 S. Clinton Avenue, a building that's long since gone, became home to the new WOKR 13 when it signed on in 1962, not long after Veterans Broadcasting sold its half of channel 10 to WHEC and bought WROC-TV-FM.