Before W and K

Laws governing the assignment of call letters have changed a lot over the last century. Contrary to popular belief, the W and K teams never switched sides. W was always predominantly in the east and K predominantly in the west. However the dividing line moved from a North-South line approximately along the Texas-New Mexico border eastward to the Mississippi river. The K stations in that 900 mile gap were issued new W call signs. But some of the existing Ws were allowed to stay. What's interesting in all this is that there were a few call signs that started with letters other than W and K.

Government stations had their own set of rules, separate from the limited commercial licenses as well. The April 1922 Issue of RADIO magazine listed only a handful of call signs in the whole U.S. at that time: WGI, WGB, WBZ, WNO, WDT, WDY, WJZ, WGY, 4CD, WGH, WRR, KZY, KDN, KZC, KZM, KLP, KGC, KYJ, KWG, KJQ, KVQ, KJJ, KQW, 6XAM, AGI, KFU, DDV, KUO, KFC, KDKA, WBL, KQV, WDZ, WPB, WMH, WOV, WHA, WLB, WLK, KYW, 9XAB, and 9ZAF. It also listed off six more station that even lacked experimental calls. It was not a complete list but you may already notice a few that do not look like the others. I'm looking at you AGI and DDV.

Prior to 1912 radio was largely the property of the military. So many rules divided up the radio band by branches of the military. Stations operated by the Navy were assigned calls starting with N, like NOF/NSF in Anacostia, D.C. on 360 meters. The U.S. Army stations used call letters starting with WUA to WVZ and WXA to WZZ. I wrote about some of these before.But being that the year was 1913, these were guidelines, not regulations. Some Army stations ignored the guidelines.  In San Francisco The Company M Signal Corps of Presidio used the call letters AGI. They are probably the only US callsign that ever started with the letter A. Sometimes written as AG1, they sometimes used the call sign 6XW to further confuse the historical record. The station was operated by Sgt. Richard C. Travers and is believed to have begun operating around 1920. It only operated on Sunday evenings from 7 to 9 PM playing records and taking questions from callers. It ceased operation in about 1923.

"There is a broadcasting station being started by the Noble Electric Works of Monterey using the old phone transmitter of the Fairmont Hotel which was one of the first broadcasting stations. Its station call Is D. D. V. and should be received very qso. (meaning strong signals) in Santa Cruz with a vacuum detector and proper tuner."

DDV was a bit more mysterious. Listed in that same issue of RADIO as owned by Noble Electric Works in Monterey, CA. They had no published schedule at that time. Wireless Age listed them as operating in May of 1922. the Santa Cruz Evening News announced the opening of the station in April of 1922. The hotel referred to is probably the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco making the old equipment formerly part of 6XG in 1921. It later changed calls to KDN. More here. I can only assume DDV didn't last long.

Postal Radio WWX-AM

Radio began early in our nation's capital. The radio band lit up in 1912 when the Department of Commerce authorized two pioneering experimental stations. One was operated by the Navy in Anacostia, NSF/NOF, and one by the Post Office, 1160 WWX-AM. Government stations were exempt from the Limited Commercial requirement that private stations carried. Stations operated by the U.S. Navy were assigned calls starting with N. The U.S. Army stations were supposed to use calls starting with WUA thru WVZ and WXA thru WZZ. Somehow, the Army loaned some calls to the post office. Great history at the centennial of flight website here.

WWX-AM was unlike all other experimental AMs. It and WWQ in Bellafonte Pennsylvania were a part of Air Mail Radio (AMR) and were the predecessors of modern Flight service stations. It wasn't until September of 1919 that The post office commissioned facilities for the stations. How they operated (and who) for the 5 interim years I do not know. By 1920 the Post office was operating a transcontinental service and was actively building airmail radio stations to support this service. By 1921 they had commissioned seventeen stations, one at each of the airfields they used. [Note the history of WWQ is even more murky since it's calls were also used by a US merchant ship at the same time!]
great history here.

Despite their progress the Airmail act of 1925 was passed and with it government operation of airmail came to an end. [On the plus side Fed Ex and UPS came to begin] On August 12, 1918, the Post Office Department took over airmail service from the U.S. Army Air Service (USAAS). Assistant Postmaster General Otto Praeger appointed Benjamin B. Lipsner, who left the USAAS, to head the civilian-operated Air Mail Service. One of Lipsner's first acts was to hire four pilots, each with at least 1,000 hours flying experience, paying them an average of $4,000 per year. The department also abandoned the polo grounds in Washington, D.C., and moved north to the larger airfield at College Park, Maryland, where it would begin its route to Philadelphia. was moved out of the post office's Monmouth facility and into The Aeronautical Office and their College park airstrip. http://www.pgparks.com/places/historic/cpam/3radio.html

In 1919 the U.S. Commerce Department formally established a broadcast service, with 833 KHz set aside for entertainment broadcasts, and 619 KHz designated for official government market and weather reports. In the Washington D.C. area only WIAY and WQAW received an authorization for 833 KHz. The first broadcast station licensed in the Washington area was WJH-AM on December 8, 1921. Fourteen days later WDM-AM and WDW-AM, received licences tying for 25th place nationwide.

Some stations survived and prospered and in fact are here today. Other became deleted. Of the above stations WJH was deleted in 1924, WDM was deleted in 1925, WDW was deleted in 1922, WQAW and WIAY were both off air by th end of 1924.

While all these stations were going off air the Navy started a second experimental station, 690 NAA in Arlington. It was built as a radiotelegraph station in 1913, right after NOF and WWX, and was located next to Fort Myer in Arlington, VA. In the mid-twenties NAA started to transmit on the broadcast band. Although its broadcasts occasionally included band concerts and speeches, it was mostly used for time signals. By 1927 it was one of three stations on air in that city. The other two were WRC on 640AM and WMAL, then on 1410. Everything else was gone. It wasn't until the early 1940's that radio recovered in D.C.

As typical, much of my D.C. radio history comes from Dave at http://www.dcrtv.org