Thomas H. White -- January 1, 2005
Three-letter calls in the United States are an emotional topic for many -- the "passing" of one leads to mourning and oratory on the need to protect these historic creatures from extinction. However, some misconceptions do exist. This is a review of the origin and history of these unique calls, plus information on some equally interesting four-letter calls.
By today's standards, the continued emphasis in the United States on call letters for radio, an entertainment and information service, is something of an anachronism -- most other countries have switched to slogans or network IDs for establishing public identity. One can imagine the cries of outrage which would result if a stuffy bureaucrat were to try to force, say, the New York newspapers to deal with the public through their "newspaper signs" of "WNYT" or "WPST". What kind of circulation would magazines entitled "WTME", "WMS", and "KGQ" garner? Still, with ninety years of tradition, call letters are fixed upon the American psyche. Besides, they make bookkeeping at the Federal Communications Commission easier.
The use of identifying radio callsigns dates actually had its origins in wire telegraphy, where each station and operator along a telegraph line was assigned a short "call" or "signal". Because all early radio work was also done in telegraphic code, spelling out an operator's full name or location would have been cumbersome, so, following the landline telegraph practice, radio transmitter calls were assigned, usually from one to three characters and often based on geographic location or personal or ship names. Thus, stations "calling" each other were able to link up with a minimum of sorting out identities. Unfortunately, during this self-assigned era there were few standards, which resulted in problems when, say, two or more ships chose the same call. Unique identifiers, organized by national origin, were needed in order to keep track of exactly which vessel was in danger of visiting Davy Jones' locker.
With the adoption by the United States, in 1912, of an act to regulate radio stations, call letter assignments became formalized under federal authority. Under international agreement unique initial letters were allotted among the various nations. The 1914 edition of Radio Stations of the United States records the contemporary practices for allocating calls for sea and commercial land stations, which at this time were few enough so that all could be given three-letter calls:
The call letters assigned to the United States are all combinations (676) beginning with the letter N and all (676) beginning with the letter W, and all combinations (598) from KDA to KZZ, inclusive. [NOTE: KAA-KCZ was allocated to Germany at this time, and was not assigned to the United States until 1929.] The total number of international calls is thus 1,950, and these are reserved for Government stations and stations open to public and limited commercial service. All combinations beginning with the letter N are reserved for Government stations and in addition the combinations from WUA to WVZ and WXA to WZZ are reserved for the stations of the Army of the United States.Notice the policy was that calls for ocean-going ship stations started with a different letter than the land stations they communicated with: in the West ships received W-- calls and land stations were assigned K--, while the reverse was true in the East, with K-- ship calls and W-- land calls. (NOTE: The assignment of W and K to the United States appears to have been completely arbitrary--they have no particular significance. N, however, had been commonly used by the U.S. Navy since November, 1909).
Amateur and Special Land stations fell into a separate callsign scheme. In fact, they did not qualify for "international" calls, and the International Bureau at Berne was not notified of their existence. The United States was divided into nine Radio Inspection Districts and these stations received calls consisting of their district number followed by a pair of letters. Regular amateurs received calls whose first letter was from A through W, for example, 8MK. (The 1914 Radio Stations of the United States noted that "The three items-a given figure first, followed by two letters of the alphabet-thus may be combined in 598 different calls, which will probably suffice for the amateur sending stations in most districts for some time to come".) Among the three licence classes known collectively as Special Land Stations, X was reserved as the first letter for stations holding Experimental licences (e.g. 1XE), Y designated stations holding a Technical or Training School licence (e.g. 9YY), and Z went to stations operating with Special Amateur licences (e.g. 8ZZ). More letters and numbers were added as the number of amateurs grew. Also, as the range of amateur signals increased it became necessary to internationalize their calls, so beginning October 1, 1928 W and K prefixes were added.
The Bureau of Navigation, a division of the Department of Commerce, regulated United States radio until the 1927 formation of the Federal Radio Commission. In 1934 the Federal Communications Commission succeeded the FRC. Understandably, the various agencies occasionally found it necessary to refine callsign practices.
In the early teens most non-amateur land stations engaged in ship-to-shore communication, and were found clustered along the coasts. As other services were developed stations crept inland, and a dividing line between the western K's and eastern W's was needed. As noted earlier, coastal land stations in states along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, including Texas, received W calls. Thus, using the Texas-New Mexico border as a starting point and heading north, the original boundary ran along the eastern borders of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.
World War I also had a disruptive effect. German submarines did much to popularize radio among American ships as wireless, formerly an expensive option, became a life-or-death necessity for making the Atlantic run. Unfortunately, there weren't enough three-letter calls to go around. The obvious solution was more letters, and four letter KE-- signs became the predominate issue for the rapidly expanding ship service, generally issued on a first come, first served basis in alphabetical order. The department, apparently noting the existence of the Panama Canal meant ships might show up on either coast, no longer tried to give ship calls that differentiated between the east and west coasts.
The less numerous land stations continued to receive three-letter calls, as turnover provided a reserve pool. Actually "turnover" is in some cases a euphemism. In the July, 1928 Radio Broadcast magazine, Broadcast Station Calls With a Past by William Fenwick reviewed a few land stations, including broadcasters WSB Atlanta and KLZ Denver, which received calls that became available with the demise of the ships that had used them. Because superstitious seafarers objected to being issued the calls "used by that ship which went down with all hands last month", these "tainted" calls were quietly issued to unsinkable land stations.
Showing partiality to vowels, the next major blocks drawn upon for ship stations were four letter KI--, KO--, and KU-- calls. After exhausting the vowels, and with KA-- to KC-- not yet assigned to the United States, the first available consonant, KD--, was drafted for ships beginning June 1920. At this point an anomaly occurred. The Bureau, perhaps caught up in a burst of egalitarianism, began assigning the last of the KU--, and the new KD-- calls to most stations, whether land or sea. The result, on October 27, 1920, was that a new Westinghouse station in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, KDKA, was sandwiched between the ships Montgomery City (KDJZ) and Eastern Sword (KDKB). The "KD-- for everyone" policy continued until April, 1921, when the original three-letter land station policy was reinstated. This meant that, in May, 1921, when the second Westinghouse broadcast station, WJZ in Newark, New Jersey (now WABC, New York City) was authorized, the original call policy had been restored. Much speculation has been made about the unique status of KDKA's call, but this uniqueness actually is just a fluke, due to the fact that no other surviving broadcaster was licenced during this short anomaly. Had KDKA been licenced a few months earlier or later it most likely would have gotten a three-letter W call like everyone else.
[NOTE: two other land stations licenced during this anomaly, KDPM Cleveland, Ohio, and KDPT San Diego, California, both originally non-broadcasting service stations, later transferred to the broadcast service but were eventually deleted.]
Dawn of the Four Letter Calls
The flood of broadcasting service authorizations that began in earnest in December of 1921 served to overload the recycling three-letter land station calls. Before the crunch the Bureau was able to assign three-letter callsigns to about 200 broadcasters.
It was the more saturated East that was the first to feel the pinch. On April 4, 1922 an application from the Times-Picayune of New Orleans broke new ground with the assignment of WAAB (now WJBO, Baton Rouge) as its call. [NOTE: WAAA was skipped as no sign was permitted with the same letter three times in a row.] The progression continued in alphabetical order, with "A" fixed as the third letter, i.e. WAAB, WAAC, WAAD... WBAB, WBAC... etc. This explains why so many pioneers such as WBAP Fort Worth, Texas, WCAU Philadelphia (now WPHT), WEAF New York City (now WFAN), WHAS Louisville, Kentucky, WKAR, East Lansing, Michigan, WMAQ Chicago (now WSCR), WOAI San Antonio, and WTAM Cleveland share this same middle letter. In later years it became the norm for broadcasters to ask for distinctive calls. However, if they had no preference they were assigned calls from blocks used for a variety of radio services. Starting April of 1923 calls centering on "B" were issued, including WBBM Chicago, WCBM Baltimore, Maryland, and WMBD Peoria, Illinois. In mid-1928 there was a jump to the middle of the W-D- block, which yielded WHDH Boston (now WEEI) and WRDW Augusta, Georgia. W-E- calls followed beginning in early 1931, including WDEV Waterbury, Vermont, WEEU Reading, Pennsylvania, and WFEA Manchester, New Hampshire. In 1934, W-F- calls started to be assigned, including WMFJ in Daytona Beach, Florida.
The West held out until May 8, 1922, when western broadcasters started sharing the four-letter ship blocks. KDYL in Salt Lake City was both the first authorization and last survivor of this group. When it became KCPX (now KFNZ) December 21, 1959 all thirty-two KD-- authorizations from this switchover had either expired or changed calls. The KF-- block, begun June 1922, boasts a few more noteworthies, including KFBK Sacramento, California, Doc. Brinkley's infamous KFKB, KFNF Shenandoah, Iowa (now KYFR), KFQD Anchorage, Alaska, and KFYR Bismarck, North Dakota. The KG-- group was tapped July 1926: KGEZ Kalispell, Montana and KGFX Pierre, South Dakota are two that survive to this day. (A ship station was not as fortunate. KGOV was assigned to the Morro Castle, which went on to burn spectacularly off the New Jersey coast in 1934. However, suprisingly KGOV is currently unavailable for use by broadcasting stations, since it is technically still assigned to the ship, according to the FCC's online Callsign Query page--KGOV). KH-- calls were reserved, beginning in 1927, for a new service category: Commercial Aircraft Stations. Surprisingly this group included a short-lived broadcast authorization, KHAC, issued in late 1927 to Flying Broadcasters, Inc. in San Francisco, for "Airplane (unnamed)". The KI-- block was drafted in early 1932, which resulted in KIEV Glendale, California (now KRLA), followed over the next few years by such stations as KIUL Garden City, Kansas, KIUN Pecos, Texas, and KIUP Durango, Colorado.
[NOTE: Calls in the early twenties were assigned at the time an application, usually a "Form 761", was received in Washington, DC, not with the issuance of the first licence, which usually took place a number of days after the application was received. Thus, you must list these pioneers by call assignment rather than first licence date for the four-letter calls to line up alphabetically. For more information see the Call Assignment Date entries in the station list included in U.S. Pioneer Broadcast Service Stations: Actions Through June, 1922. Also, there is an anomaly in the assignment of W calls which may mean that WAAB was actually the second four-letter W call issued. Purdue University's application for a station in West Lafayette, Indiana was assigned WBAA on the same day, April 4th, that WAAB was assigned. No other WBA- calls were issued until two weeks later, after the WAA- calls had been exhausted. It is possible that the original plan was to start with WBA- calls, but after WBAA was issued the situation was reconsidered and the procession pulled back to start with the WAA- calls.]
Three-letter Calls After 1922
All broadcast station activity in three-letter calls did not cease following the 1922 switchover to four-letter calls, as about half of today's holders of three-letter calls trace their first assignment to later than 1922. In many cases these post-1922 calls were not the station's first, but were ones they changed to some years later. Some calls were claimed when a previously authorized broadcaster or other station expired. And many of these calls were specially requested to tie-in with a slogan or licencee name: "World's Largest Store" (Sears); "World's Greatest Harbor" (Norfolk, Virginia); "World's Greatest Newspaper" (Chicago Tribune); "Woodman Of the World"; "We Shield Millions" (National Life), etc. The last new three-letter call assignment, excluding reassignments of previously used calls or FM and TV sister stations, was WIS (now WVOC), "Wonderful Iodine State" in Columbia, South Carolina on January 23, 1930.
The June 30, 1931 edition of Commercial and Government Radio Stations of the United States listed 93 three-letter broadcasters out of a total of 631, about 15% of the stations. It was only in the post-World War II boom, when stations came to be counted in the thousands, that these calls have faded into relative obscurity, although their absolute numbers have not declined as much.
Actually new three-letter calls are still being assigned, although not for broadcast services. Their use is currently reserved for a service which dates back to the original 1912 assignments, Coastal Land Stations. However, even this group has threatened to exhaust the small allotment. Previously "Class 2" coastal stations were allowed to draw on the block. But an impending shortage forced the FCC to restrict these calls to only new stations of the "Class 1 (excluding Alaska)" classification, where the matter stands today.
As noted by the 1914 edition of Radio Stations of the United States, the standard practice was to separate K and W calls, "with a few exceptions". Various exemptions over the years, combined with the 1923 boundary shift, mean that in some areas K and W calls have become intermingled. Some exceptions do not have an obvious cause. For example, there does not seem to be any particular reason why KQV Pittsburgh, KYW--originally in Chicago and now in Philadelphia--or KSD in Saint Louis (now KTRS) should have gotten K rather than W calls. It may be that a harried bureaucrat either momentarily forgot the policy or on which side of the boundary the station was located. One exception, however, apparently was made to have a little fun--short-lived KOP was licenced to the Detroit Police Department. [For more information on K/W call letter policy, check out K/W Call Letters In The United States.]
FM and TV Sister Stations
FM and TV were developed in the 1940s and 1950s, and obviously the new services needed callsigns. After a short period of requiring FM and TV stations to have unique calls, the FCC decided to allow stations in the same market to have the same call as sister AM stations, provided they added an "-FM" or "-TV" suffix. (These suffixed calls were technically five- and six- letters, counting the two letter suffix.) All FM and TV stations trace their three-letter calls back to an original AM station.
Until 1957, wherever you found an FM or TV station with a three-letter call, the original three-letter AM was still around. The first exception occurred as a result of the American Broadcasting Company's 1953 decision to change the calls of its New York City stations from WJZ (AM, FM, and TV) to WABC. This proved very traumatic to the Westinghouse Corporation, which had founded WJZ thirty-two years earlier in Newark, New Jersey. (In 1923 the station was moved to New York City and transferred to RCA, where it became the flagship for the NBC-Blue, later ABC, network.) Although FCC rules prohibited new three-letter calls, they didn't restrict new five-letter ones, so, four and one-half years after WJZ disappeared the FCC gave Westinghouse permission to rename its Baltimore TV outlet "WJZ-TV". With this precedent a new chapter of callsign practice began. This was the first time permission was given by the FCC to reclaim a previously abandoned three-letter call. In addition, this was also the first case of an "independent" three-letter call, i.e. one that did not appear concurrently on any AM station. A year after the appearance of WJZ-TV the second "independent" appeared, when the University of Texas was granted permission for a new Educational FM station in Austin, Texas. The calls KUT-FM were assigned (another five-letter call), in honor of the original KUT, which the college had sold three decades previously, and which became KNOW (now KFON) in 1932. Since then "independence" has become more common, for in addition to the total of 56 active AM three-letter calls as of January 1, 2005 there are 13 independents, for a total of 69 different three-letter calls on all bands.
NOTES: Some of these FM and TV stations, because there is no longer an AM station using the three-letter call, have gotten permission to drop their -FM and -TV suffixes, and been assigned true three-letter calls. Also, in 1987 the rules were relaxed a little, and stations no longer have to be in the same market or even have a common owner to use the same "base" call. However, a common call is still restricted to just one station per band, with -FM, -TV and -DT suffixes added as needed. Finally, occasionally a confused person will claim that AM stations can get -AM suffixes. This is false. AM stations only get three- and four-letter calls--no AM station has ever been formally assigned an -AM suffixed call, although in informal usage people will sometimes include one.
Beginning in 1995, the FCC has allowed Low Power TV stations to have callsigns with "-LP" extensions, followed in 2001 by Low Power FM stations. In addition, in 2000 a new Low Power TV classification of "Class A" stations was added, and these stations are eligible for callsigns with a "-CA" suffix. But so far all the basic calls for these stations have been four letters, so it doesn't appear that there will be any three-letter Low Power stations.
However, a second new TV service, Digital TV, which is scheduled to eventually replace the existing analog TV stations, has begun adding stations to the three-letter callsign ranks. The new Digital TV stations use -DT suffixed calls, with the base call staying the same as the one assigned to the analog sister station, e.g., WRC-DT is paired with WRC-TV, etc. As of the FCC's November 30, 2004 list of DTV Stations on the Air, 16 of the 21 three-letter TV stations now have Digital TV counterparts. (WSB in Atlanta was the first three-letter call to be used concurrently on all four broadcast services--AM, FM, TV and DTV. In 2002, WMC in Memphis became the second four-service assignment) However, these -DT calls may prove to be temporary, disappearing when the old analog stations are shut down.
Some people, seeing the disappearance of three-letter calls from the AM band, have accused owners of not being historically minded. The opposite is true. When AM holdings are disposed, the very historically minded owners often keep the three-letter calls for their FM and TV stations. And the good news about this development is that there have only been three cases (KWK, KYA and WOW) where a three-letter call, saved as an independent, is now completely gone from the airwaves. So, what does the future hold? Well, if you like your three-letter calls on the original stations, it's bound to be bad. AM radio doesn't have the financial glamour it once did, and more AMs will be unloaded, with callsign custody often passing to the more prosperous FMs and TVs. Some missing calls might return -- the FCC has had a soft spot at times for prodigal sons. Below are the occasions when three-letter calls which had completely disappeared from the AM, FM and TV bands were allowed to return:
Unfortunately, the overall trend is for fewer three-letter calls, which is a shame. Below is a review of the number of three-letter calls in existence on various dates from January 1, 1922 through January 1, 2005, which chronicles a rapid rise, peaking at 185 active three-letter stations on May 10, 1922 (almost all broadcast stations at this date had three-letter calls), then a decline through 1926, caused by high station mortality and the switch to mostly four-letter calls, followed by a small rally through 1930 due to specially requested calls, closing with a slow attrition over the remaining decades, as the government no longer issued new three-letter call to broadcast stations:
Current Three-letter Calls
The map below all 69 unique three-letter calls in use as of January 1, 2005. The 56 calls in black are still held by the original or related AM station (some of these calls are also used by related FM, TV, and Digital TV stations), while the 13 calls in red have been dropped by the original AM station, but continue to be used by related FM or TV stations--WJZ-TV, KUT (FM), WRR (FM), KGB-FM, WRC-TV, KHQ-TV, WJW-TV, KOB-TV, WIS (TV), KDB (FM), WIL-FM, KGW (TV), and KSD (FM).
Three-letter Callsigns as of January 1, 2005
The following list includes all three-letter calls in use as of January 1, 2005. The first three columns list information on AM-band stations, which in all cases were the original holders of the three-letter call. The "Call" column lists the current call of the original station, with stations that have dropped their three-letter call listed in parentheses and in lowercase. The "first" column notes the first date that the station used the three-letter call for a broadcasting service authorization. (An "*" marks stations where this three-letter call was a call change for an existing station, and thus was not the first call the station had.) An entry in the "last" column notes change-over dates in cases where the AM station no longer holds the three-letter call.
The "FM", "TV" and "DTV" columns list the stations for these three services which currently hold three- (or five-) letter calls.
Major AM Three-letter Call Actions: January 1, 1932 - January 1, 2005
The list below recaps the significant AM three-letter call actions from January 1, 1932 through January 1, 2005. [NOTE: For a fuller review, of all the actions starting in 1921, see: Three-Letter Roll Call]
"Total on AM" is the number of three-letter calls on the AM band after the action took place. "Not on AM" is the number of "independent" three-letter calls, i.e. held only by an FM or TV station after being given up by the original AM station. "All Bands" is the total number of unique three-letter calls in use on AM, FM and TV, i.e. "Total on AM" plus "Not on AM".
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