NY <
me@privacy.invalid> wrote:
https://www.rd.com/article/radio-stations-k-w/ is an interesting article about why US radio station names always begin with K or W. But the
sentence that made me chuckle was "The United States was given the letters
W, K, N, and A." Was that a random allocation, or was the committee
pulling the US's plonker with that allocation of letters?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_call_sign
" In the absence of international standards, early transmitters constructed after Guglielmo Marconi's first transatlantic message in 1901 were issued arbitrary two-letter calls by radio companies, alone or later preceded by a one-letter company identifier. These mimicked an earlier railroad telegraph convention where short, two-letter identifiers served as Morse code abbreviations to denote the various individual stations on the line (for instance, AX could represent Halifax). "N" and two letters would identify
U.S. Navy; "M" and two letters would be a Marconi station."
(this is why UK radio amateurs can today get an 'M' callsign, because that
was originally Marconi, a British company)
"United States merchant vessels are given call signs beginning with the
letters "W" or "K" while U.S. naval ships are assigned call signs beginning with "N""
So N = Navy. Then:
https://earlyradiohistory.us/recap.htm
"The authority to assign radio call letters to ships, which Chamberlain
claimed under the July 5, 1884 act, did not include land stations. (At this time the U.S. government had not yet started licencing radio transmitters). The date of the changeover to the new three-letter radio calls wasn't stated
in the 1911 annual report, however, an October 25, 1912 General Letter from
the Department of Commerce and Labor later referred to "the call letters assigned to American ship stations on July 1, 1912, by the Bureau of Navigation". (U.S. merchant ships were still using their old two-letter
calls according to the January 1, 1912 edition of the Navy's Wireless
Telegraph Stations of the World, but the new three-letter calls are listed
in the radio call letter list in the June 30, 1912 edition of the Annual
List of the Merchant Vessels of the United States, with K calls assigned to ships on the "Atlantic and Gulf Coasts", and W calls going to the "Pacific Coast" vessels.) In many cases, all that was done was to add a K or W in
front of the ship's original two-letter call -- see 1911-1913 Ship Callsign Comparison Chart for more details. I don't know why K and W were chosen for the initial letters, or why the Bureau thought it necessary to split the assignments into two geographic groups -- they had not done anything similar with the visual signal letters. It is possible that W stood for "west", but that is pure speculation on my part.
These new three-letter K and W ship radio calls were assigned just prior to
the signing of the 1912 London International Radiotelegraphic Convention. A note appearing with the June 30, 1912 lists stated that "Radio call letters
of American vessels on the Atlantic and Gulf in the K series are subject to revision under international agreement". The modification that was reported shortly after the end of the London Convention was that, although all
initial N and W callsigns were assigned to the U.S., only calls from KD
through KZ were included in the U.S. allocation, so the U.S. ships that
had been assigned KA- and KC- calls in the June 30, 1912 list had to be
issued new ones -- see 1911-1913 Ship Callsign Comparison Chart for more details.
Then, with the passage of the Radio Act of 1912, the Bureau of Navigation
was assigned the additional responsibility of licencing both ship and land radio stations, so it now also controlled call letter assignments for land stations, which had also traditionally used two-letter calls. And for commercial land stations the Bureau adopted the opposite policy from what it used for ship stations, i.e. land stations were issued three-letter K calls
in the west and W in the east. In many cases, the process again consisted
of adding a K or W in front of the station's original two-letter call, e.g.
HA at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina became WHA, GO in Chicago, Illinois
became WGO, and PH in San Francisco, California became KPH. And some land stations which already had three-letter calls just had their initial letter changed to meet the new international standard, e.g. MCC in South
Wellfleet, Massachusetts became WCC. (For more information on the initial
land station call letter assignments, see the July 1, 1913 issue of Radio Stations of the United States.)
(NOTE: A May 9, 1913 Commerce Department publication, Radio Call Letters, stated that, like ship stations, land stations would get W calls in the west and K in the east. The identical wording appears in the July 1, 1913 issue
of Radio Stations of the United States, which was the first official station list issued after the U.S. began licencing stations. However, according to the station lists appearing in the latter publication, it is clear that the commercial land stations were actually being issued calls in the opposite pattern, i.e. K in the west and W in the east. And, beginning with the
July 1, 1914 edition of Radio Stations of the United States, the wording was changed to reflect the correct pattern for land stations.) "
So it could be that W=west coast of the US, and K=east coast, but E was
already taken by Spain. KA to KC was taken by Germany, so the US got KD to
KZ until 1927 when they got the rest.
Since the US already had N and W, maybe the second half of K was all that
was left? The Great Powers got at least one whole letter each, and the
other countries were fighting over the scraps?
Theo
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