DECODER

posted by James Reel

    While I was doing an Internet search just now for something completely unrelated (information on the Warehouse District downtown, if you must know), I stumbled upon this great list of the origins of radio and TV call letters. KUAT's is one of the more straightforward: the UAT stands for University of Arizona, Tucson. (The call letters of broadcast stations west of the Mississippi begin with K, and those east of the Mississippi begin with W. Our list-maker, Tucsonan Barry Mishkind, doesn't explain this part as far as I can tell, but the K stands for Kaiser Steel, and the W for Westinghouse, the two companies that owned the most radio stations in the 1920s when the call-letter scheme was being systematized.)