[BC] Call Letters question...

[Donna Halper]

On 6/12/2012 1:02 PM, Blaine Thompson wrote:
> Someone just told me this.  Any idea if it's true, or not?
>
> "Someone at the federal level had a "rule" that four letter call signs (WZZY, for example) could not have 3 consecutive identical letters"  This would be in the 1920s.
>    
That's news to me.  Many of the early radio station calls came from 
ships at sea that had sunk and the next ship didn't want those calls 
(bad luck, evidently).  Some of the ships did have at least 2 
consecutive calls that were the same letter.  But I've never read there 
was a rule about having three call letters be different-- I think it was 
just that the Department of Commerce (there was no FRC or FCC yet) never 
expected to run out of the three-letter calls. Early articles about 
radio spoke of it as a fad for hobbyists and "boy engineers" that would 
soon die out, so the Dept of Commerce didn't prepare for four letter 
calls until they had to.  But I truly do not remember reading any 
articles about an official rule-- and even if there were such rules, the 
Department of Commerce was not exactly famous for staying on top of 
things, as we know from stations in the mid-1920s that decided to change 
their dial position or boost their power and the DOC had little power to 
stop them.