Pete's Log: Log Entry 222
Entry #222, (Life in General)(posted when I was 21 years old.)
ok, so since i woke up at 6 and have been unsuccessful in my attempts to fall back asleep, I decided to hunt down the answer to yet another question that has been plaguing me for a long time: "Why do stations east of the Mississippi have call letters beginning with W, while stations west of the Mississippi have call letters beginning with a K?"
Well, the first thing I found was verification that this was a fact, not just a trend or tendency. On November 15, 1940, Broadcasting magazine ran an article describing a proposed call letter plan for FM broadcasting that had been developed by the FCC. In it is the following sentence: "In devising the new system, the department feels it has given actual meaning and significance to the call combinations. All W prefixed stations would be located east of the Mississippi and all K stations west." So at least I wasn't imagining this. But the article gave no reason as to why this was. So the search continued.
A refined search on google for "FM radio call letters" yielded me the jackpot: http://www.ipass.net/~whitetho/3myst.htm
I shall summarize:
Call signs date back to the early usage of radio, namely when it was employed on ships. Since morse was used at the time, they needed short identifiers that could be quickly broadcast. However, there were no standards at first, and chaos reigned. Three letter call signs became standardized, and some international body handed out blocks of signs to various countries. The USA got the blocks beginning with K, N, and W. (Actually, Germany owned a small portion of the K block for a while, but later gave it to the US.) N was reserved for military use, and is apparently still in exclusive use by the U.S. Navy. So the decision was made that ships in the Atlantic would use call letters starting with K and that ships in the Pacific would use call letters starting with W. Land stations on the coast would use call letters that started with the 'opposite' letter of the ships they would be communicating with, in order to avoid confusion of whether a station was a land or a sea station. So, east coast stations had call letters beginning with W, and west coast stations had call letters beginning with K. As radio began to move inland, it was realized that a boundary would have to be drawn between the W's and the K's. Originally this boundary was along the New Mexico/Texas, Colorado/Kansas, Wyoming/Nebraska borders, but in 1923 it was decided that this border should be moved to the Mississippi (presumably to balance the K and W stations, since the east had many more stations than the west). However, the few stations that were in between the old and new borders were allowed to keep their W call letters. These are stations such as WKY Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, WOI Ames, Iowa, and WHB Kansas City, Kansas. Later on it was realized that the three letter call signs would soon be insufficient in number to handle the needs of stations in the US, so call signs were extended to be four letters long, but existing three letter call signs were allowed to continue.
Some random trivia: no call sign may have the same three letters in a row, so the first four letter call sign that was assigned was WAAB.
So now I've solved another of the great mysteries that plague my life.