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I always found these call signs very difficult to remember (especially if they are all 4 letters and all contain K or W and aren't abbreviations for anything, as compared to BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, or WDR, the Westdeutscher Rundfunk), and have always wondered why radio stations in the US have adopted these very technical and meaningless, hence user-unfriendly signs as their public names. (I don't think they are used in any other country, at least not in the European countries that I know.) I understand that the usage is decreasing in the US, but still: why did the stations adopt this system in the first place? --Anvilaquarius (talk) 16:01, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Remember that the use of call signs predates the first broadcasting stations, and dates to the earliest days of communication by radio circa 1900. When broadcasting began to appear in the 1920s it was natural for these stations to also be assigned call signs for record keeping. Initially this included the UK, for example 2LO in London. Another early European broadcasting station was PCGG at The Hague in the Netherlands. However, use of individual call signs fell out of favor in cases like the BBC when stations began to be linked up for national programming and no longer had individual identities.
In the U.S., stations are still individually licensed, and most have at least some local programming, so it makes sense to maintain a method for keeping track of each one. Individual countries have been assigned by international agreement unique blocks of call signs for their use, and there are a few other countries besides the U.S. that have some stations that continue to use these for their main identity, for example, in Canada CKLW in Windsor, Ontario and VOCM in St. John's, Newfoundland (Newfoundland was an independent colony until 1949 and was assigned VO- call letters), XEB-AM in Mexico City, DZUP in Manila, Philippines, and VL2CA in Canberra, Australia (Australian radio station call signs generally start with "VL", however they usually drop that part of the call sign when using it as their slogan.)--Thomas H. White (talk) 19:04, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
You also have to remember just how many stations there are in the US. According to Radio in the United Kingdom, there are approximately 600 radio stations in the entire country. My own state of North Carolina has nearly that many (List of radio stations in North Carolina). The same frequency may be used for multiple stations in the same state. Formats (country, rock, rap, talk, classical, etc) are often represented by multiple channels within the same city. And many of the slogans used by stations are repeated more or less exactly by other stations in other markets. Call signs are the one thing guaranteed to be completely unique for a station. --Khajidha (talk) 18:35, 29 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
