In the 1912 and forward years, people were using Morse. I think someone may have said, “2 pulse codes could get confused w/ the rest of the call sign, 4 pulse codes are too long, 3 are just right. So Let’s pick codes where one starts with a dah and the other a dit, so from the very beginning, even if the rest of the transmission is lost you can at least determine east or west coast.”
K in morse is dah-dit-dah. W is Dit-dah-dah. So if the conditions occur where a station transmits and you hear a dit, it’s a W. if you hear a dah it’s a K. But let’s say it’s a really noisy transmission and you hear two of the three pulses: dah-dit…K, dit-dah…W.
Unfortunately this all breaks down if you hear dit dah and miss the initial dah for W. In that case it could be eithr a K or a W. G and U would have been completely distinguishable in noise: dit-dah-dah, and dah-dit-dit could not have been mistaken for each other at all. Why they didn’t use that is a mystery. Maybe there’s some morse code transmission rules that have been lost to time. Maybe those were reserved letters for Canada or something.
I was the original source for most of the information in this article. The initial call letters were assigned internationally, and I haven’t found any evidence that the regulators based their assignments on the patterns within the Morse characters. There are only a small number of dot-and-dash sequences available, so no matter what you choose there will be possibilities for confusion. For a good operator it would have been a point of pride to keep things straight.
I still don’t understand why the Bureau of Navigation bothered to separate the east and west radio calls, since it had not done anything similar when it was assigning visual flag identifiers. Also, prior to 1912 in the U.S. the radio companies self-assigned their own call letters, and none of them used an east-west split.
radio signals travel around the world. the whole world was using radio. the world made treaties to regulate how radio would be used for the worlds benefit. it was all decided there and the whole alphabet was used.
as far as using Morse code and noise: it’s what radio operators do. it is ordinary.
for people who do ham radio the highest license class, when Morse code was required, was 20 words per minute. you learned to deal with natural and man made noise, that’s just the nature of using a radio with AM (earlier was spark gap). you trained your ear and you discriminated again all the other stuff.
professional radio telegraphers had to be good. it was there job. major use of radio was lifesaving. they got good.
numbers had 5 elements (dot or dash) and punctuation had 6. there were also prosigns, 2 letters that had a meaning, where the whole thing was sent as one string.
using Morse fast and proficiently took skill and practice.
I was speculating. The expression in my post “may have said” was meant to indicate that.
I have had a lot of experience with voice radios in high noise environments. The use controlled radio codes was well thought out so that there were different words for different activities, in a regulated expression so that if you missed part of the message you had enough to proceed. That got me thinking about K and W in particular.
The US did after things started to get organized, but it was like the wild & wooly west in the very early days of radio. You made up your own callsign, or none, which resulted in some duplicates and much confusion.
As far as the W/K situation, once a country was assigned the first letters, it was pretty much up to each country how to use them internally or what letters/numbers to use after the prefix.
I see a problem with this theory: If I am on the West coast monitoring ship traffic, I probably will never receive an East coast transmission from the Atlantic. Same thing if I am on the East Coast: I’ll never get a Pacific transmission. There’s no need to make the distinguish if a transmission is of East or West Coast origin.
Besides, why not take something like O or S which were completely different (one is three dashes and one is three dots) or D and U (dash-dot-dot vs. dot-dot-dash)?
when telegraph and telephone started being able to cross borders then the world made an organization (ITU) and treaties for countries to have worldwide communications.
when radio telegraphy (Morse code stuff) started the method was some version of a spark. this caused lots of noise and interference between stations.
radio companies made their own call signs and refused to communicate with any station not in their company; this was big money involved in this new technology.
technology changed and AM was used for radio telegraphy. the need for communication between countries (or their ships)became obvious. most early use was maritime where radio provided a means of long distance communication from a ship.
the ITU then was given the task of regulating radio for the world.