There is also a station named KFAN-FM in Texas

KFAN (1130 AM) is a sports talk radio station in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area of Minnesota that also can be heard in North Dakota and Wisconsin through The FAN Sports Radio Network. The station even has its own restaurant in Roseville, Minnesota, where many broadcasts currently originate. Currently operated by Clear Channel Communications, the station is one of the oldest in the state, dating to December 23, 1923 when Doctor George W. Young signed on with the call letters KFMT.

Dr. Young cycled through the names WHAT, WGWY ("W-George W. Young"), and finally WDGY ("W-Dr. George Young") in the next two years until being chastised by the government for changing too frequently. The station kept the name WDGY until 1991. WDGY operated on a number of different frequencies before settling onto 1130 AM in 1941. More recently, KFAN experienced severe storm damage in April 2004 at their transmission site, with four out of nine antennas at their directional array in Credit River Township (near Prior Lake, Minnesota) getting blown down.

In 1933, Dr. Young was granted a license for W9XAT, an experimental mechanical television station. It is believed that the first transmission of the 120- or 125-line system—probably the first telecast in Minnesota—occurred on August 4 of that year, featuring a handshake between WDGY station personality Clellan Card and Minneapolis mayor William Kunze. The station pushed the technological limits of the day and provided a lot of interesting exercises for WDGY engineers, but Dr. Young never got into regular broadcasts. The license for that station expired in 1938, partly because mechanical television development was heavily discouraged by that point. After 64 years of dormancy, an amateur radio group in the area acquired the W9XAT call sign in 2002 with the intention of using it for mechanical and narrow-bandwidth TV experiments.

WDGY gained the (perhaps unfortunate) nickname Weegee after a time. By the 1960s, the station didn't use the name itself, but the name stuck among people in the radio industry for many years to come. From about 1955 to 1977, the station played popular music and was one of the most popular stations in the area, primarily competing for music listeners with KSTP 1500 and KDWB 630, though WCCO 830 was the major force of the day even with a mixture of music, talk, and farm reports. WDGY station changed to a country music format in September 1977, around the time when most music stations began shifting onto the FM band. The country format continued until circa 1989, when it became "News Talk 1130, WDGY". This format gradually morphed into the Sports talk format, and the calls were changed to KFAN in 1991.

KFAN the Restaurant opened in 2004. The food services are managed by Grand Management, which operates a chain of Sidney's restaurants in the Twin Cities. Clear Channel Communications considers it to be a pilot project and may try to create similar restaurants across the country if it is successful. KFAN's main studios are in Minneapolis.

The FAN Sports Radio Network

† KXSS is owned by Regent Communications.

External links

• KFAN (http://www.kfan.com/)
• KFAN Transmitter Site Tour (http://www.geocities.com/aaron_white/)
• Transmitter Visit of KFAN (http://www.qsl.net/k9ez/kfan.htm)
• W9XAT: The Twin City Experimental Amateur Television Society (http://www.ac0x.com/w9xat/)