What's in a Call Sign?
On July 15, 2019, more than two weeks after I successfully completed the amateur radio Technician class license exam, I found myself listed in the FCC call sign database. My call sign was KN6DBC. My logbook shows that I worked KC1CAL in Florida on a linked repeater system that morning, the first of what now numbers in the thousands of QSOs.
Almost immediately, I developed a love/hate relationship with my call sign. I took pride in it as the call sign that I earned by passing that first of (so far) two exams. Once I had a chance to establish myself among the amateur radio community, it became a sort of on-air identity. But it doesn't flow well. The phonetics—kilo november six delta bravo charlie—don't exactly roll off the tongue, nor is it particularly easy to key in CW. There's that K. I've lived my entire life in a part of the United States where the broadcasters all start their call signs with a K. K is commonplace. K is old hat. W means you're a long way from home. W means you're probably doing something cool; surely a W would make me sound cooler on the air. And then there was the N, right there in the prefix, right where it could sow the seeds of confusion. It was just way too easy to mishear my call sign as N6DBC. On busy satellite passes, where things happen fast and where there's rarely time to correct errors, it cost me more that a couple QSOs.
The question was whether to do anything about it, and what to do about it. The existing call sign did have a certain charm of it own, and I couldn't really think of any combination of characters that I thought would really stand out. My full name is Edward Dale Little, and I usually go by the diminutive form of my first name, Ed. It's not always clear if the letters EDL are being used as my three initials, or my first name and last initial: EDL or Ed L. For this reason, I've never really identified myself with my three initials, and so a call sign like W6EDL wouldn't have much meaning. Most of the letter combinations that have some radio-related meaning—things like UTC, DX, CW—have already been thought of. I considered W6WGN, in recognition of the countless hours I've passed watching the Chicago Cubs on WGN back when it was distributed over basic cable, but it doesn't flow particularly well and the idea of appropriating the call sign of a broadcaster that I'm not connected with never quite felt right.
In the mid 1970s, shortly after an advertising jingle writer who went by the name C. W. McCall recorded the hit song "Convoy", but before Burt Reynolds played opposite Sally Field (while Jackie Gleason, with his impeccable comedic timing, stole the show) in Smokey and the Bandit, our family got in on the CB craze. In a time when mobile telephones were a plaything for the wealthy and the Internet (at least as we know it today) didn't exist, the novelty of being able to talk to friends or strike up conversations with complete strangers while traveling was quite a lot of fun and often useful. This was while the FCC was still licensing CB operators. The license my dad applied for and received, the license that covered the whole family, was assigned the call sign KSR5199.
About a year ago, just for laughs, I entered KSR5199 into the FCC's call sign database search page. Nothing came up. Nothing. I wasn't sure what to do with this realization. We're too deep into the Information Age. We expect information to persist. We've all attended the meetings where an HR manager sternly warns us that text messages and e-mails are forever. That a government record—a US Federal government record no less—could vanish wasn't something I was prepared for. I later learned that the FCC shredded everything related to CB licenses sometime in the '90s. All those road trips where we would coordinate fuel and meal stops with our friends over CB, all the good-natured needling about who was going to win Sunday's race while waiting for the gates at Riverside International Raceway to open, the time we were dangerously low on fuel on the back roads of northern Arizona and a REACTer gave us directions on channel 9 to the nearest filling station, all of it seemingly invalidated in a single act of bureaucratic house-cleaning.
This simply could not stand. Then I realized it didn't have to stand. The ability to bring that call sign—or at least its prefix—back to the air was just a few mouse clicks away. On June 1, 2020, the FCC granted my request for the new call sign W6KSR. The call sign flows well phonetically, and is even better in CW, and the 1 x 3 format is just a little easier to get through the pileups than a 2 x 3. The three-letter prefix to our family's old CB call sign has been received and retransmitted on all six permanently inhabited continents and all 50 US states. It has been transmitted by voice, Morse code, radio teletype, and FT8. It has been carried over satellites in space, and it has gone out across the waters of Long Beach Harbor from a sailboat.
Given the way the FCC has assigned amateur radio call signs over the years, I knew when I applied for it that mine probably wouldn't be the first station to identify as W6KSR, but the previous assignee would remain a nameless, faceless abstraction until idly Googling my own call sign one day turned up a call book from the 1930s. The original W6KSR turned out to be Wilbur Miller (SK). Born in Norwood, Missouri in 1917, Miller spent his teenage years in Long Beach, California, where he served as treasurer of the Long Beach Polytechnic High School Amateur Radio Club (then W6LSM). Miller worked in the broadcast radio industry as an engineer and on-air announcer starting with KPMC in Bakersfield, before moving on to KFVD (now KTNQ) in Los Angeles and then KTAR-AM in Phoenix. Incidentally, Woody Guthrie's breakout as an artist occurred when he performed on Los Angeles radio with Maxine "Lefty Lou" Crissman. The home of Guthrie's program was station KFVD, and while it's unclear how well—if at all—he and Miller knew each other, they would have been at the station contemporaneously.
One is never, as the saying goes, the owner of a call sign, but rather its caretaker. I've apparently given myself double duty as the caretaker of two old call signs. The decision to change a call sign is a personal one, as is the decision to keep the call sign that one earned all those years ago by passing an exam. There are as many stories as there are hams. Thanks for reading mine, and feel free to share yours in the comments below. 73
Acknowledgements: Wilbur Miller would have been just a listing in an old call book were it not for significant contributions from Endaf Buckley N6UTC, and Martin Gostanian of the Paley Center for Media. Their invaluable contributions breathed life into my call sign's previous caretaker, and for their assistance I am truly grateful.
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