[2] A then-current student and future winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Ernest Lawrence, was made responsible for station operations and built the transmitter.
[4] On May 26, 1922, a telegram was sent to the University of South Dakota, authorizing a broadcasting station, with the sequentially assigned call letters WEAJ and operating on the 360 meter "entertainment" wavelength.
[9] (The KUSD call sign had been previously assigned to the steamer City of Honolulu, which caught fire and sank in October 1922.
[10]) That same year, it was shut down for two weeks for rebuilding and to connect it with the new auditorium on the USD campus;[11] it emerged as the first 250-watt outlet in the state.
[17] In 1952, KUSD moved to 690 kHz using a newly constructed two-tower directional antenna north of Vermillion, with the station now limited to daytime-only operation.
However, this represented a significant expansion in output, as the station went from broadcasting for just three hours a day to operating from 9:30 a.m. to sunset.