Amateur radio stuff

[altivo]

This has come up twice in the last year, and I did some historic research this week to verify my stance on the subject. [Possibly boring discussion of ham radio call signs follows.]

My amateur radio call sign is K9NZI and has been that for the last eleven years. Before that it was KA9NZI dating back to 1982 when I was first licensed. The KA prefix was the one being assigned to all new novice class licensees at that time. The numeral 9 indicates that my station is or was located in the ninth call district, which includes the state of Illinois where I live. The NZI suffix was assigned by the FCC when my license was issued, and they were doing that in a strict alphabetical sequence so that KA9NZH preceded me and KA9NZJ followed me. In other words, the suffix in my call sign is there by pure chance and was not of my personal choosing.

A few people have assumed that NZI makes some connection with "NAZI" which is simply not true. I am not a subscriber or supporter of any kind of fascism. And I had nothing to do with "choosing" NZI anyway.

There was a long period when the FCC kept call sign records on physical filing cards. Back then, they also reassigned call signs to a new person when the existing station license had been cancelled or expired for some length of time. At some point, however, it was deemed too much work to do this and the practice ended. The only way an amateur call sign is reassigned today is by the personal request of an existing licensee, subject to various limitations having to do with license class and other qualifications.

I was under the impression (incorrectly, it turns out) that someone else had already held K9NZI and though I was qualified to ask for it (as a shorter call sign is almost always preferred, especially when dealing with Morse code) I did not do so until eleven years ago. My license was up for renewal, and at that time I could request a change to K9NZI by paying a $10 fee. I looked it up, and no one had it then, so I asked for and received the change. No one was thinking about NAZIs at that time.

Recently I learned that the Internet Archive now has call sign directories going back to before World War II. They are PDF files and cumbersome to search in, but that's how I learned that not only was K9NZI unassigned in 2011, it had never been assigned at all. W9NZI was held by someone, but going back to the mid-1950s, when K9 prefixes were first used, the FCC never reached that far in the alphabet. After running all the way to "ZZZ" in populous zones like California (K6) and New York (K2) they started over with WA and then WB prefixes, and soon applied that to the other eight zones even though there were still unused K call signs in those zones.

Consequently, it seems that I am the only operator who has ever held the K9NZI call sign, and I intend to keep it.