In article ,
Aaron Jones wrote:
(Robert Bonomi) wrote:

HAH! Look up the history of channel 5, Ames Ia. Early on, Iowa State
University used W0YI, for their television station, which _is_ the callsign
for the amateur radio facility there. The eventual commercial callsign WOI
is a direct derivative of that amateur radio callsign.

I'm not sure how "early on" you mean but from my 1934 Callbook you'll notice
it's W9YI not W0YI since there was no tenth district:

I meant 'early in their history of TV Broadcasting'. More clear? grin

[Also, some ignorance on my part. "District 10" predates _me_, by most of
a decade. I didn't know it was a 'Johnny-come-lately' grin ]

Considering when the TV station had their '50 year of broadcasting'
celebration, they would have to have been doing a fair bit of the early work
under the W9YI call-sign.

I think they were the 1st operating TV station in the state. (What is now
WOW-TV in Omaha seems to have been on the air around 15 months earlier.)

WOI was a very unusual operation. It went from early experimental to a
full-blown 'for profit' _commercial_ station (it was the ABC network affiliate
by the late Fifties, probably earlier), owned and operated by a State
University. The students that were _good_enough_ would manage to get jobs
(_real_ jobs, not work-study, or an 'internship) there, as students. Then
they got a _real_ education, in addition to what was taught in the classroom.
Actually, the station, and the teaching department got along quite well.
*Everybody* came out of that program with a solid understanding of 'real world'
operations.


The Campus Radio Club pre-dates experimental television, by a fair
number of years. It _is_ an engineering school, after all. grin

W9YI-Iowa State College, Edd R. McKee, 2119 Country Club Blvd., Ames Iowa.

However by my 1947 Callbook the switch to W0YI had been made and as another
poster pointed out they kept the same suffix:

W0YI-Campus R. C., Eng Annex, Iowa St. Coll. Ames Iowa


Yup. R.C. is the "Radio Club". Still using the same callsign.

The TV station got their own license after the tenth district was created,
They were broadcasting TV under the W0YI call for a non-trivial period. They
wanted to maintain, as much as possible, the 'name recognition' they'd built
up -- so they looked at both derivatives of W0YI -- WOY, and WOI -- and
settled on the latter, for a number of (not terribly compelling reasons.