WNWI (1080 AM) is a time brokered radio station broadcasting an ethnic radio format. Licensed to Oak Lawn, Illinois, United States, it serves the Chicago area. The station is currently owned by the Birach Broadcasting Corporation. WNWI operates on a clear-channel frequency, with WTIC in Hartford, Connecticut and KRLD in Dallas, Texas the dominant Class A stations. WNWI's calls stand for "Northwestern Indiana", a reference to the station's former city of license of Valparaiso, Indiana. The station broadcast a full-service adult contemporary music format from Valparaiso from its sign-on in 1965 until the spring of 1998, when it officially moved into the Chicago market by changing its city of license to Oak Lawn and relocating its transmitter to Riverdale. The bulk of WNWI's programming is Polish language music, news, and talk programming. Other weekday programming includes Serbian Radio Chicago, a one-hour radio show hosted by Milorad Ravasi which incorporates news, music, and interviews from Serbian culture. On weekends, programming blocks variously target the German, Macedonian, Polish, and Serbian communities. History WNWI applied for its original license in 1962 when it was originally owned by the Hershman family in Valparaiso, Indiana. The FCC delayed the application process for nearly two years, when competitor WAKE was allowed to go on the air first. The ownership of WNWI sued the FCC because its application for a community AM radio station was already "in process" before WAKE's. The FCC ceded the hold on the license process and approved it immediately, which put two AM stations on the air at the same time in the small community in 1965. The ownership applied for 1080 kHz because of its strategic location in the center of the AM band (hence its second moniker "The Center of The Dial", which extended to promos for news, weather and the like as your "news center", "weather center", etc., the station's main moniker "Your Live Leader" was used almost from its inception.) The AM band extended, at that time, from 540 to 1600 kHz, and the theory that an antenna built on the campus of the historic Valparaiso Technical Institute would have better radiation characteristics for a 250-watt daytime station at that frequency was a planned, engineering gamble which resulted in a 312-foot omnidirectional antenna system. Their expertise in electrical engineering of the site bore out this theory when the FCC issued the first permits for pre-sunrise operation at 9.7 watts.