Radio stations why k

We have the US government to thank for this. Early radio operators informally used a series of call letters to identify each other. The process began back with the telegram well before radio—even commercial radio existed. Having different names and letters for different categories was confusing. To the unfamiliar and untrained eye, ships, people, and even landmarks could all be identified and it was difficult to keep everything straight.

In , the U. Those letters were the result of international agreements hammered out at International Radiotelegraphic Conferences at the beginning of the 20th century. Appendix 42 to the Radio Regulations of the International Telecommunications Union ITU [6] still lists all international call signs, as assigned at the London conference.

For instance:. The Morse Code for A is dot-dash. Add a dash to each, and you get W dot-dash-dash, or. Incidentally, radio call signs are reversed out on the ocean. In the latter scenario, the aim was to extend W call signs to radio stations on land in the west of the country, and K to terrestrial stations in the east — but the instructions got scrambled somewhere between the draft of the order and its implementation. Quite early, the border between K Country and W Land had to be fixed geographically.

After January , new radio stations in the switchover states would be assigned a K call initial rather than a W one. But a grandfather clause provided that those radio stations in those states which already had a W call sign could keep it. This explains some of the anomalous call signs still in existence today, if not quite all of them. This map shows them all, and colour-codes [9] them into seven categories:. A fairly well-known piece of trivia.

Dave, Portsmouth, UK Actually, American radio stations will start with either a K most stations in the west or a W most stations in the east. They're assigned when a station is licensed. However, why K or W I have no idea. Under international agreement, since the alphabet has been divided among nations for basic call sign use.

The United States, for example, is assigned three letters--N,K, and W-- to serve as initial call letters for the exclusive use of its radio stations. It also shares the initial letter A with some other countries. When the federal government began licensing commercial radio stations soon after, it had planned to assign call letters to the land-based stations in the same way. Somehow, things got flipped during implementation, though, and Eastern stations got W call signs and the Western ones got Ks.

Where exactly does the Bureau of Navigation draw the line between East and West? For a while it ran north along state borders from the Texas-New Mexico border, but shifted in to follow the Mississippi River. Some areas, however, might have both a K and W station in the same vicinity.