CONCERNING THE BASIS OF THE CALL SIGNS FOR RADIO, AND TELEVISION. THEIR IS MORE TO BE CONSIDERED.
The United States federal government began licencing radio stations in late 1912, and from the beginning it has assigned call letters starting with K and W to commercial and broadcasting stations. Moreover, from the start the policy has been that stations in the west normally got K-- calls, while W-- calls were issued to stations in the east. (Initially ship stations were the reverse, with W assignments in the west, and K in the east).
The original K/W boundary ran north from the Texas-New Mexico border, so at first stations along the Gulf of Mexico and northward were assigned W calls. It was only in late January, 1923 that the K/W boundary was shifted east to the current boundary of the Mississippi River. With this change, K's were assigned to most new stations west of the Mississippi, however, existing W stations located west of the Mississippi were allowed to keep their now non-standard calls.Click here for a detailed map showing the boundary change NOTES: The source of the Mississippi River is in upper Minnesota, so using it as the K/W boundary leaves a gap in the northern part of the state. In 1987 the Federal Communications Commission noted that the current staff practice was to define the remainder of the boundary as "a line from the headwaters of the [Mississippi] to a point [at the Canadian border] just east of International Falls". This review generally omits stations in Louisiana and Minnesota, because the boundary has not been very strictly followed in those two states. Finally, this review lists stations according to their "community of licence", and does not include stations which only had transmitters on the other side of the divide. (Call letters are assigned according to the station's community of licence--the location of the station's transmitter, even if it is on the other side of the divide, does not matter).
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For more detailed information on early U.S. call letter practices, see Mystique of the Three-Letter Callsigns and United States Callsign Policies .
Reasons For The Exceptions
Reviewing the stations on the AM band, many people have noticed that some of them have the "wrong" first letter for the side of the Mississippi River on which they are located. During the ninety years of call letter assignments for AM stations, I came up with six categories of non-conforming stations:
Stations located east of the Mississippi which were assigned calls from the KD-- ship block, instead of W--, during a June 1920 to April 1921 anomaly. (For some reason, during this anomaly almost all new land stations, east and west, got KU-- or KD-- four-letter calls. This included two broadcasting stations that just happened to be first licenced during this time: KDKA and KDPM).
Stations west of the Mississippi River that were licenced before the late January 1923 boundary shift, and were located in the slice of W territory that existed west of the Mississippi prior to the shift. (Originally about 170 stations, not including Minnesota and Louisiana. However, due to very high deletion rates plus later call changes, only eleven of these original calls survive: WEW, WHB, WKY, WOC, WOI, WBAP, WDAY, WJAG, WNAX, WOAI, and WTAW).
Portable stations (prior to 1928), which got W call letters because their original owners were located east of the Mississippi, but settled in a permanent home west of the Mississippi. (Four stations: WBBZ, WIBW, WLBN, and WMBH. There are no examples of a portable crossing in the other direction, i.e. no K portables "anchoring" in W territory).
Regular stations that changed their community of licence to the other side of the K/W divide. (Seven stations: KFKX, KSGM, KWEM, WKBB, WPLX, KOTC and KQQZ. NOTE: This omits Louisiana and Minnesota.)
Owner requests--examples: WACO in Waco, Texas; WDBQ in Dubuque, Iowa; WMT (Waterloo [Iowa] Morning Tribune).
Assigned by the Government--three stations. KTGG in Spring Arbor (later Okemos), Michigan reportedly got a "K" callsign because someone at the FCC thought that the "MI" postal code stood for Missouri, a west-of-the-Mississippi state. Also, two additional call assignments appear to have been selected by government regulators: KYWA Chicago, a booster station for KYW, and KOP, licenced to the Detroit Police Department.
FOR MORE GOTO. https://earlyradiohistory.us/kwtrivia.htm