The facility ID number, also called a FIN or facility identifier, is a unique integer number of one to six digits, assigned by the U.S.

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdicti ...

(FCC) Media Bureau to each broadcast station in the FCC Consolidated Database System (CDBS) and Licensing and Management System (LMS) databases, among others. Because CDBS includes information about foreign stations which are notified to the U.S. under the terms of international frequency coordination agreements, FINs are also assigned to affected foreign stations. However, this has no legal significance, and the numbers are not used by the

regulatory Regulation is the management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields of biology and society, but the term has slightly different meanings according to context. ...

authorities in those other countries. Current FCC practice is to assign facility ID numbers sequentially, but this is not an official requirement, so third-party users must not rely on it. Unlike

call sign In broadcasting and radio communications, a call sign (also known as a call name or call letters—and historically as a call signal—or abbreviated as a call) is a unique identifier for a transmitter station. A call sign can be formally ass ...

s, however, the FIN associated with a particular station never changes; thus, the FCC staff and interested parties can be certain to which station an application pertains, even if it has changed its

since the application was originally filed. (The previous FCC database system, the Broadcast Application Processing System or BAPS, did not have such an identifier.) In several cases, television stations have swapped facilities, and thus their FIN numbers, as what occurred in 1995 in

Miami Miami ( ), officially the City of Miami, known as "the 305", "The Magic City", and "Gateway to the Americas", is a coastal metropolis and the county seat of Miami-Dade County in South Florida, United States. With a population of 442,241 at ...

, when NBC-owned station WTVJ swapped channels with CBS's WCIX-TV (after the swap, WFOR-TV); NBC thus took the FIN and transmitter formerly associated with WCIX-TV, while WFOR-TV continues to operate under the FIN originally established for WTVJ.

References

Broadcasting in the United States Federal Communications Commission Identifiers {{US-tv-stub