etv78
April 2, 2011, 12:51am
1
Why do radio and tv station call letters start with “W” east of the Mississippi River, and “K” west?
We’re not sure.
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 [for ships] 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…
(bolding mine)
Land stations were later given callsigns following ship practices, with K in the east and W in the west. Later, they defined a land boundary between K and W.
the USA is allowed to use call signs starting with AAA–ALZ, K, N, W; this is international treaty. W and K are used for broadcast TV and radio.
originally K was the west of Texas border line, later the Mississippi River. it was the convention used by the government from the start.
There are a number of exceptions, described in this essay.
And, yes, there are a few stations west of the Mississippi with call signs starting with W, and a few east of it with call signs starting with K, but they’re pretty much all very old stations that had their calls assigned before the convention was set in stone.
It is interesting, WSAJ, the first licensed land station, has the proper W for a Pennsylvania station. Second comer KDKA has a K