The REC Radio History Project has completed the latest FCC History Card compilation. This time, 32 stations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and in surrounding rural communities have been archived back with basic engineering and ownership data which in some cases, dates back to the early 1920s.
From the first days of radio until the late-1970s before the advent of computers, the Federal Communications Commission and its predecessor the Federal Radio Commission kept basic licensing records on 3x5 index cards similar to an old card catalog in a library. As a part of the FCC's move to their current facility in the late 1990s, the cards were transferred to microfilm and subsequently destroyed. Over the past few years, the FCC has made some of these microfilm records available to the general public. Currently, only AM records are available and those are limited to "K" call letters as well as some "W" calls (WA through WF and some WG). This is a project that is on an "time available" basis and with the latest cuts at the FCC, we are not sure how this will impact their conversion of the microfilm to public access.
The REC Radio History Project's goal is to provide as much historical information about a particular radio station at REC's broadcast query website FCCdata.org.
The REC Radio History Project is going in market rank order. Our next project will take us on a short trip south on I-45 to Nielsen Audio market #6, Houston. The Houston project will include 33 stations starting with KUT (now KTRH) on 740kc which came on the air in 1922.
The REC Radio History Project also includes several other sub-projects including the Public Notice Retrieval project that has fetched the public notice records of engineering related applications from the 80s and 90s. This project is completed for radio. We will do television at a future time. Also, the BAPS Data Recovery Project uses public downloads from the 80s and 90s to recover full engineering records from the previous FCC computer system that were not carried over into the current CDBS system. So far, this project has recovered over 1,100 AM and FM engineering records. REC is actively seeking those who may have saved FCC engineering database files downloaded from FTP since 1985 and from the web since 1995. Please contact REC if you can help.
For a listing of stations already recovered in the History Card Project, visit: http://recnet.net/history.
The following is the list of stations that will be included in the next History Card Project in the order they will be worked:
Market #6 - Houston, TX
