In article , Robert Casey
writes:

Never quite understood it, but it used to be that a callsign belonged to
the "station" and
not the operator, or something like that.

Yep. That derives from the fact that in most other radio services, the station
and the operator are/were completely independent licenses.

For example, consider maritime radio. A typical ship station has aseveral
operators, but the ship's callsign stays with the ship. The operators, OTOH,
change with the watch and from voyage to voyage. Same for broadcasting and many
other services.

Amateur radio is almost unique in that it is a licensed service where, in the
vast majority of cases, the station owner, engineer, operator and license
holder are all the same person.

Once it happened many years
ago that two
brothers got licenses but the FCC gave out only one callsign, as they
used the same
"station".

That must have been before WW2. Maybe even before the FCC, because there have
long been OM/XYL and other ham family setups where everyone had their own
callsign even though there was only one station.

The FCC recently decided to change that theory to one that
more closely
matches the way hams think of their callsigns. That a ham "owns" a
callsign and uses
it on whatever ham equipment he happens to be using at the moment. If I
borrow your
ham shack, I would still use my callsign. Once I'm satisfied that your
equipment works
correctly. "Looks like a kenwood TS440SAT, receives like one, and seems
to transmit
like it should."

There was a time when using your callsign/portable at my station was not
allowed by the rules. In fact, if you go back far enough, there was a time when
mobile and portable operations by hams were not allowed by the rules.

It also used to be possible to get additional station licenses so you didn't
have to sign portable or send in postcards. A typical situation would be one
where a ham had a vacation home where hamming would take place. Of course some
hams used this provision to hang onto callsigns they didn't want to give up
when moving out of a call district.

Portable operation was allowed first (early 1930s) but for a few years you
needed a second station license with a special callsign. Oddly enough, mobile
(land vehicle) operation came later - even after aeronauticla mobile operation
by hams was allowed. US hams were not allowed to use mobile on the ham bands
below 25 MHz until 1949.

73 de Jim, N2EY