Probably just a case where where with the eastern/central satellite services, they aren’t exactly attached to the one state and are probably licensed as a satellite service first, so there’s little point to get a last letter.
QQQ probably still got a “Q” because the north east satellite zone (as it was then) was practically just Queensland. Same with GWN’s remote services in the western zone.
On the other hand, Imparja’s central zone would have included South Australia too, even if it was centred in Alice Springs, so it wasn’t “just” NT. We’ll never know what would have happened to the south-east zone as Satellite South-East* never got off the ground but one assumes it would’ve been similar.
* Curious to learn that QSTV and the proposed South-East service were originally consortia of practically all of the regional stations at the time (plus QSTV even had BTQ7 take a slice), but in hindsight I don’t know how that was ever going to work if they were only able to run one channel, with so many cooks stirring the pot.
So it was probably not the worst thing for the whole idea that QSTV ended up just in the hands of Telecasters NQ, even if it meant it ended up stuck with mostly Ten for a while like its Townsville station. (GWN were so far along with monopolising regional WA television that it’s not like there was as much of an option of alternative ownership there.)
If there is meant to be a standard for TV callsigns, i can’t work out then how Imparja’s ends with a P… other than being an obvious abbreviation… QQQ, CDT, IMP should probably all end with an R… for Remote, so maybe they should be something like QTR, ITR and CDR.
There are conventional standards but there will always be exceptions, e.g. “IMP”, same with radio in that there is a standard protocol but lots of variations tend to happen.
There is certainly print evidence that QSTV started with the same three-hexagon logo as NQTV, and an Alice Springs newspaper report [still online] mentioned its switch from Ten to 7 Central [to realign it with the then-new 7 Darwin] in 1999. It’s very likely that once Telecasters became a major part of Ten metro’s ownership and they removed the QTV branding on the main regional stations, it was just fed a version of “Ten Queensland”. (Would have they bothered to cherry-pick from 7 and 9 for such a small population in 1994? I have my doubts…)
But were they fed just “QTV” (both Ten-affiliated and the original Nine-dotty) and even “NQTV” branded stuff before that, with QSTV just being a name on paper? That period, from its start in 1998 up until around 1994 or 1995, is hard to find out. Mount Isa newspapers - post 1990 when ITQ got taken over - might help (more for ads as I suspect it was still branded QSTV or even ITQ in the guides), but one’d need to go to the QLD State Library and study microfilm for that as it’s not online.
This was the QSTV logo provided to me at the time by NQTV circa 1988.
My understanding is that once aggregation happened in Queensland, QSTV (QQQ) as with ITQ pretty much just mirrored the QTV/Ten QLD (TNQ) schedule from the aggregated market. There might have been some opt outs for non-Ten programs or coverage (e.g. Olympic Games in 1992/96), but I am not aware of any specific examples.
IIRC, the other stations in the TVA group were CTC7 Canberra and SES8 Mt Gambier. I can’t recall the fifth member, it might have been AMV4 but I can’t remember now.
