[HN Gopher] "Stolen" radio tower missing for at least a year
___________________________________________________________________
"Stolen" radio tower missing for at least a year
Author : LeoPanthera
Score : 169 points
Date : 2024-02-17 10:24 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.radiodiscussions.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.radiodiscussions.com)
| itpcc wrote:
| Obligatorily, Geerling Engineering (by Jeff Geerling and his
| father) video discuss this issue last week [1].
|
| EDIT: Seems likely the tower is already unused [2]. Maybe they
| think they can getaway without AM Tx?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZSxb8QIIa4
|
| [2]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZSxb8QIIa4&lc=Ugyb6d-c8ai0c...
| wut42 wrote:
| Your [2] is the same video. Did you wanted to link
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78PvlGCqM84 ?
| schiffern wrote:
| Their [2] is a direct link to a Youtube comment (note the lc
| param). The linked comment will be pinned at the top of the
| comments, but it doesn't matter because the channel already
| pinned the same comment.
|
| Text of the comment is below:
| @GeerlingEngineering 2 days ago *Update* (Feb 14):
| YouTuber @WilliamCollier visited the tower site on Monday and
| documented the tower base, fence, building... and details
| like a missing power meter. Lots of evidence points to a
| tower site that's been unused for a long time:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqIysr3o_vY (warning:
| language) Before you consider donating to the
| station's GoFundMe, I would recommend waiting to hear the
| full story. There's more to this story than a tower being
| suddenly stolen (which is definitely not what happened here),
| forcing a small community FM station off the airwaves.
| rubyfan wrote:
| I make it a policy to never donate to a situation I hear
| about on the internet, especially if there's a gofundme.
| Maybe that's an overreaction it just seems like a good
| heuristic for 'this is likely a scam'
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Experience bears that out like 99% of the time. My only
| exception is when I know and trust the person setting up
| the fundraiser... even then...
| gosub100 wrote:
| I think the risk of ill-gotten gains is offset by the
| stupidity of people willing to donate to them. I dont
| really have +/- feelings about either party in that
| situation.
|
| What I find funny is how gofundme (I hate that name, it
| sounds so entitled) is 3/4 of the way to re-discovering
| this thing called insurance. All they need is to somehow
| promote/emphasize people who donated previously should
| _they_ ever find themselves in need. i.e. if you donated
| 5x during the year to car accident victims, at a cost of
| $x00, should _you_ get in a car wreck, you should be able
| to use evidence of your donations to get a spotlight on
| the site. Voila, tech bro comes full-circle and
| "disrupts" insurance pools (by exploiting a loophole
| around all those pesky state regulations, lets make
| "insurance commissioners" the new cab driver )
| greggsy wrote:
| I highly doubt the owners didn't notice a power meter being
| removed. The theft angle is a bit hard to believe.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Anyone care to summarise the back story to this?
| mkl wrote:
| https://www.al.com/news/2024/02/someone-stole-a-jasper-
| radio..., big discussion 9 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302045
|
| Radio station owner says transmitting tower was stolen, as if
| it had disappeared overnight.
|
| Related story about things not adding up:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39397568
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| This is one of those stories that every single police
| procedural show on TV/streaming will have some version of in
| the next production cycle.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Commercial small town AM station owner with a license to re-
| broadcast on FM as part of an FCC program to help AM stations
| survive (by giving them exposure on the FM dial, but they must
| keep broadcasting on AM)...took down his AM tower years ago
| according to satellite/streetview, changed the logo on the site
| to de-emphasize the AM band and instead carry the FM band, then
| for some reason drew a lot of attention to himself claiming the
| tower was stolen. It looks like it was possibly either as part
| of a plan to exploit people, or suddenly someone noticed and
| started asking questions.
|
| He then put up a gofundme.
|
| He apparently had no monitoring of any kind. Nobody in town
| knows nothin' (nobody noticed the AM broadcast going away, and
| nobody noticed trucks hauling out tons upon tons of metal etc),
| scrap dealers (who are clearly the most ethical, honest sort)
| know nothin', the tower would not have sufficient value to
| justify such a brazen theft as it's not copper. Broadcast
| techs/operators who kinda all know each other, also know
| nothing and are calling the situation questionable to outright
| bullshit depending on how polite they are.
|
| Geerling and his dad are erring very much on the polite-but-
| this-doesn't-add-up side which is responsible. I their video
| they also share photos of them doing a planned takedown of a
| tower that took weeks/months and still went a bit 'sideways'
| and left a clear channel of damaged trees where it fell.
|
| The situation is muddied by some young/dumb youtuber going to
| the wrong site where there is another abandoned tower site, as
| well as the correct site having two transmitters/towers on it
| until the AM station's tower was taken down.
|
| I think there's also at least one video a few years old of
| someone parked at the site with their radio tuned to the AM
| frequency, getting nothing.
|
| From the comments on one of the videos:
|
| ====
|
| @ianlawrence4993 22 minutes ago Thank you for the video. It
| really is crazy how most large news organizations are failing
| to ask basic questions about this story and keep falling for
| Elmore's dog and pony show.
|
| From Google Street View images, it appears that the tower has
| been dismantled (or at least mostly dismantled) for around a
| year or so. All of these photos were taken from basically the
| same location (accounting for digital zoom).
|
| January 2022
| https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8067222,-87.2682012,3a,15y,3...
|
| October 2022
| https://www.google.com/maps/@33.806721,-87.2681688,3a,15y,34...
|
| Both WJLX's tower (dark colored) and the neighboring tower for
| WIXI (red and white striped) are visible.
|
| March 2023
| https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8067219,-87.2682037,3a,15y,3...
|
| January 2024
| https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8067226,-87.2681813,3a,15y,3...
|
| The WIXI tower is visible but there is no sign of the darker
| WJLX tower.
|
| Sometime between October 2022 and March 2023 it appears the
| WJLX tower was dismantled to the point that it cannot be seen
| on Street View.
|
| Shout out to the folks over on the Radio Discussions forums for
| pointing this out first (at least to my knowledge).
| https://www.radiodiscussions.com/threads/wjlx-wjbe-and-werh-...
|
| Also, from the Internet Archive it appears WJLX changed the
| masthead logo on their website in the middle of 2022. The old
| "Jasper's Oldies" logo advertised both the 1240 AM channel and
| the 101.5 FM channel. The new "Voice of Walker County" logo
| only advertises the 101.5 FM channel.
|
| Old Homepage April 1, 2022
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220401022504/https://www.wjlx1...
|
| New Homepage May 16, 2022
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220516051909/https://www.wjlx1...
|
| However, the thumbnail image for the GoFundMe set up by the
| station for a new tower is the old "Jasper's Oldies" logo which
| includes the 1240 AM channel. GoFundMe page
| https://www.gofundme.com/f/wjlx-1240-am-tower-and-equipment-...
|
| They have brought back the old logo to make it appear that they
| are an AM station when their marketing has ignored that for
| almost 2 years now. It seems to me that they stopped
| broadcasting in AM no later than 2022, and given their previous
| proceedings with the FCC probably much earlier than that. It is
| telling that in the interviews with local residents for this
| story, there is no clarification on whether or not they had
| listened to the AM channel specifically any time recently.
| hollywood_court wrote:
| That's sound about right for small town Alabama. I'm in East
| Alabama and we have a local broadcast owner who is probably
| disappointed that he didn't think of this first.
| scheme271 wrote:
| > nobody noticed trucks hauling out tons upon tons of metal
| etc), scrap dealers (who are clearly the most ethical, honest
| sort)
|
| If you look at images of mast towers, there isn't much there.
| Basically a metal scaffold with the antenna at the top. If
| you look at this tower[1], a 85 foot tower is about 480 lbs,
| and the radio tower was supposedly around 200 feet tall so ,
| it's probably less than 1200 lbs of metal. Probably a fairly
| large load but probably not really unusual.
|
| 1 - https://wadeantenna.com/product/85-foot-commercial-guyed-
| tow...
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| > _The situation is muddied by some young /dumb youtuber
| going to the wrong site where there is another abandoned
| tower site, as well as the correct site having two
| transmitters/towers on it until the AM station's tower was
| taken down._
|
| Can you expand on how you determined that they went to the
| wrong site? The only other AM station within many miles is
| WIXI [1], which is 0.35 miles away and has a white building
| [2], unlike the one shown in the video.
|
| The pictures shown in the OP's link only show that there were
| two towers (WIXI an WJLX) and eventually one (WIXI).
|
| One-third of a mile in a wooded area is far enough to not
| show in the video.
|
| [1] https://fccdata.org/?lang=en&latd=33.8549&lond=87.2707
|
| [2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/CM1MwZBCDnCQgtUH7
| michaelt wrote:
| _> The situation is muddied by some young /dumb youtuber
| going to the wrong site where there is another abandoned
| tower site_
|
| Take a look at this https://imgur.com/a/Qj9Aqaj which
| compares a photo issued by the radio station to the video at
| 16:45 https://youtu.be/bqIysr3o_vY?si=hiK5zNH_AhqiwK2w&t=1005
|
| Are you seriously telling me those are different buildings?
| anon-sre-srm wrote:
| This looks like fraud to get money from people through
| deception for a tiny radio station that can't sustain itself.
| jacurtis wrote:
| I'll attempt to summarize information coming from many
| different sources to help people out and provide context.
|
| WJLX is a radio station in Jasper Alabama. It operates a
| standard music+talk radio station that they brand as "WJLX
| 101.5". They are licensed to operate on AM 1240 frequency. But
| most (seemingly all... as addressed later) of their audience
| listen on the FM 101.5 version of the channel which is a
| simulcast of the AM 1240 frequency. They don't have a dedicated
| FM license, but are able to legally use this 101.5 FM frequency
| due to a loophole for old AM stations that allows them to reach
| FM audiences by translating the AM station on an FM frequency.
| This means that if the AM broadcast stops, that they
| immediately lose rights to broadcast on FM 101.5, which is the
| frequency they brand their station under and most/all their
| audience is. All this information is important as will be
| apparent soon.
|
| The station owns an AM Radio tower for its "primary" frequency.
| The story goes that a brush cleaning crew was hired to clean up
| tall brush around the station, as is required. They showed up
| and found no tower there. They called the tower owner who then
| confirmed that the brush cleaners were at the right place. He
| then drove down to the site and when he got there, confirmed
| the tower was gone. So he then called the police who showed up
| and deemed that the tower must have been stolen.
|
| As soon as the FCC heard that the tower was gone, that means
| the AM station isn't broadcasting which means that WJLX is no
| longer allowed to broadcast on the FM frequency since they are
| only allowed to do it as a translation of the AM, which no
| longer exists. The station was ordered to go offline within 24
| hours of the tower being reported stolen.
|
| The station has been operating at a loss for its entire
| existence and relied on public broadcasting government grants
| to break even. It can't afford to rebuild the tower. So it
| started a GoFundMe to rebuild the tower. Looking for $60k and
| currently has around $20k towards that goal.
|
| Since this news broke that a 200 foot tower (2/3 the length of
| a football field) dissapeared without a trace, it has started
| getting a lot of attention. The station owner is standing by
| the fact that it was "stolen". Internet sleuths are trying to
| figure out if this is plausible. OP's link is to various Google
| street view images that show that the last recorded image of
| this tower standing was in October 2022. It shows that another
| streetview image in March 2023 shows the tower missing.
|
| This means two things:
|
| 1. The tower went down between October 22 - March 23
|
| 2. The tower has been down for almost a year and was just
| reported stolen a few days ago
|
| So how did the station owner not notice for a year that his
| tower was missing?
|
| Some people are speculating that the stolen tower is a ruse to
| gain attention and sympathy to fund building a new tower. It
| came out recently that the owner had let the insurance on the
| tower lapse. So he has no way to rebuild it. He is unable to
| afford it and it was uninsured.
|
| Within a day of the tower being reported missing, some nearby
| software developers decided to go out on a saturday and
| investigate the tower site to see what they found. The video is
| here: https://youtu.be/78PvlGCqM84?si=5II7VeKY1tv41mXL . Namely
| they confirmed that its been down for a long time. The video
| might be interesting to see the state of disrepair of the
| location.
|
| So now the mystery is whether the tower was really stolen and
| if so, how did they do it with no one noticing? A lot of people
| are suggesting that the owner is manufacturing the theft story
| in order to gain sympathy for his GoFundMe.
| lando2319 wrote:
| So supposedly a radio tower was stolen, causing a sister station
| to have to shut down as well
|
| But this link suggests maybe the tower's been missing for some
| time
| greggsy wrote:
| Stolen, or deliberately scrapped by the owners? It's entirely
| possible they legitimately thought that the FCC wouldn't care
| about the AM requirement in their license.
|
| The owners would almost certainly know that the thing went
| offline. They would have a maintenance schedule, and power
| bills to pay.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Is it at all possible that they outsourced the physical
| maintenance - including paying the power bills - of the tower
| to someone else, who in turn screwed them over?
| sitkack wrote:
| It is hard to imagine the FCC wouldn't notice that there was no
| signal on that AM station for that amount of time, or the owner,
| or the power company.
|
| Everything about the story is weird.
| lutoma wrote:
| The owner probably noticed but didn't care. Presumably the only
| reason they still had it was because they were legally required
| to so they could keep operating on FM.
|
| And I doubt the FCC is constantly monitoring any random AM
| station if nobody complains.
| sitkack wrote:
| They definitely spot signals that _shoudn 't_ be there, even
| AM radio stations.
|
| I think no one at the FCC cared, the broadcaster knew the
| tower was gone and also didn't care since their main concern
| was apparently running the FM station.
|
| > Elmore explained that they were alerted to the theft on
| Friday when a bush hog crew arrived at the WJLX tower site in
| Jasper to clean up the property, only to find it completely
| cleared out by the thieves.
|
| You don't get alerted that the tower and the transmitter are
| gone by bush crew. You get alerted by the signal being gone.
| He should have been paged 2 seconds after the signal stopped.
|
| I still don't buy it.
| quesera wrote:
| The FCC does not monitor broadcasts for presence or
| content. They do respond to complaints (typically
| interference), but a missing signal creates no
| interference.
|
| If someone else wanted that AM allocation, they would have
| filed a complaint that the licensee was not operating, and
| the license would be cancelled.
|
| It's also not typical to monitor your own signal directly.
| You have telemetry coming back from the transmitter site.
| This includes antenna VSWR which would spike if the antenna
| disappeared. Or no telemetry at all, if the transmitter
| building lost power or was raided etc.
|
| There is zero possibility that a compliant licensee would
| not be aware of an antenna loss within seconds of it
| happening. So the question becomes what level of
| noncompliance this licensee was operating under. Sounds to
| me like they were cheating because AM transmissions are low
| ROI.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| A tiny operation like this? I doubt they had anything
| close to telemetry. Rather, they probably had a tech who
| visited the site ever couple months. Nothing in the
| shack/tower would have required daily maintenance. Their
| only realtime "telemetry" might have been when the power
| bill for the site was lower than normal.
| quesera wrote:
| Fair points, but:
|
| Telemetry is cheap in the scheme of broadcast expenses.
|
| If the station is operating on a shoestring budget, you
| have at least one human who cares that the revenue-
| generating operations (broadcast signal) are happening.
|
| Similarly that person would notice the change in power
| expenses.
|
| Even in the lowest-tech, least-compliant of stations,
| someone would notice an antenna and/or tower loss within
| a day. This reads like a case of severe neglect, almost
| certainly intentional, and possibly fraudulent.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| This charitable explanation hinges on the assumption that
| they _want_ to run an AM station.
|
| Given that their license is for a FM rebrodcaster, it
| seems like the FM business is the one they care about
| more, and the AM signal was just being used as a means to
| an end.
| quesera wrote:
| You're right. They clearly did not want to run the AM
| station, and it was likely a negative ROI operation.
|
| My assertion though, is that there's no chance that they
| were unaware that the AM station was down.
|
| The only path to plausible deniability requires _extreme_
| non-compliance, which risks fines and could even threaten
| their ability to hold other licenses / operate other
| stations.
|
| So they're in trouble either way, but this story of
| surprise is absolute crap.
| scarby2 wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the rules here but is not caring a
| complaint route to a defense? It can be in many other
| fields.
|
| I.e. purposefully don't have any monitoring, purposefully
| don't go to the site often etc. then only respond of
| someone tells you there's a problem.
|
| I've dealt with a few contracts in the past that have
| stipulated that we must respond within xx hours of
| becoming aware of an issue, if I didn't want to run the
| service it would be in my interests to do everything in
| my power not to avoid becoming aware of any issues.
| gorlilla wrote:
| You appear to be conflating a few things. The
| 'contractor' timeliness of xx hours is typically
| stipulated in a contract as an Service Level Agreement
| (SLA) parameter.
|
| There are regulatory causes for 'xx' response times as
| well, outside of a contract.
|
| The first part you brought up was willful ignorance[0]
| which would likely come into play with licensing,
| insurability, as well as tort and criminal liabilities.
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_ignorance
| quesera wrote:
| No. If you hold a license, you are obligated to operate
| the station at the licensed power. Not caring is not
| allowed.
|
| In this case, they were required to operate the AM
| station to keep their FM license. In addition to the
| usual threats to license and fines etc, they were also
| risking their FM license which persumably was ROI
| positive.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Assume the AM is a negative-ROI operation. Thus why would
| they care about quality? Why would there be *any* form of
| quality check? Any check requires effort and thus makes
| the ROI even more negative.
|
| I can see scrappers stealing the tower and nobody
| bothered to find out. I can also see scrappers stealing
| the tower, the station knew but since it's negative-ROI
| they pretended they didn't.
| burnerthrow008 wrote:
| Because the part of their operation that presumably _is_
| ROI-positive (the FM transmitter) is technically a
| rebroadcast of whatever they are transmitting on AM. If
| the quality of the AM signal is actually so bad that
| nobody can receive it, then they will forfeit their FM
| license too.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| Even without a proper modulation monitor, simply tuning a
| radio to the station will tell you if you're on-air or
| not.
|
| The operators knew. They just didn't care. Or they may
| not have known that the tower had been stolen and assumed
| the transmitter was broken and were procrastinating to
| fix it.
|
| Moreover, I can't imagine anyone successfully tearing
| down a working antenna. My guess is the timeline went:
| transmitter stops working, site sits idle for a few
| months, thieves notice it's turned off, raid the place,
| station owner finally decides to do something about it,
| discovers they've been cleared out.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| A more likely scenario is the owner was strapped for cash
| and arranged for a crew to take the tower.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Especially because the transmitters disappeared, too. ALL
| the station equipment disappearing? Wonder who's got it
| now, or what it's been parted out to for other AM radio
| stations scraping together gear to keep running.
| quesera wrote:
| Smash and grabs of transmitter building equipment are
| relatively quick. They set off alarms (usually) of
| course, but you can get out in 15 minutes with a few
| racks of gear.
|
| Taking down a tower requires more time and care. And
| tools. And it pays less for scrap, although the black
| market for the kind of equipment you find in a
| transmitter building is small and not well-capitalized.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| What do you mean they don't monitor for silence?
|
| https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2022/07/articles/fcc-
| cracki...
| akira2501 wrote:
| You should read the linked decisions in the article.
|
| The FCC learned about the dead air because the stations
| themselves filed Special Temporary Authority paperwork
| with the FCC specifying that the station carrier was not
| active during that time.
|
| So, it was not active monitoring, but passive paperwork
| review, triggered by the license application itself, that
| caused the ruling.
|
| The FCC does not actively monitor stations in any way.
| quesera wrote:
| That article does not talk about the FCC _monitoring_
| ordinary licensees for "silence" (which I assume means
| off-air i.e. transmitter turned off, and not dead-air
| i.e. broadcast of silent audio).
|
| (Dead air is actually a bigger sin than off-air. Off-air
| happens. Dead air should almost never happen.)
|
| The article talks about monitoring stations who have a
| history of poor usage of their license. And it's not
| clear that "monitor" here would mean any active steps, vs
| just requiring the usual mandatory reporting of
| unscheduled, unpermitted, extended off-air events.
|
| But the FCC does not routinely monitor for dead air or
| any other violations. They do respond to complaints of
| all kinds. In competitive markets, licensees monitor each
| other.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _He should have been paged 2 seconds after the signal
| stopped._
|
| I think you're greatly overestimating the technical
| sophistication of this operation. I'm not saying they
| didn't notice sooner, but I doubt they had this sort of
| modern monitoring system set up. It seems like the sort of
| operation that has been coasting on minimal money/effort
| for many years.
| quesera wrote:
| It is not legal to operate a remote transmitter site
| without full telemetry coming back to a human (studio)
| operator, or (more recently) an automated system which
| will alert a chief engineer, which is a required designee
| of all licensees.
|
| The question remains: in what ways were they operating
| noncompliantly?
|
| However there's almost zero possibility that they were
| unaware of their antenna loss until the brush crew showed
| up. Unless the theft happened overnight (some AM stations
| shut down at night).
|
| Even if nothing else clued them in, a transmitter without
| an antenna will basically shut down, and the electric
| bill will go to near zero.
| lupusreal wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, the station has changed hands a
| few times in recent years because the owners kept going
| bankrupt, and furthermore the station has gone off the
| air numerous times before due to deferred maintenance. So
| noncompliance seems like a very safe bet!
|
| In light of that, it's possible they had no functional
| telemetry or nobody was paying attention to it, and
| therefore, it's plausible they really didn't notice when
| the antenna went missing. But if I were the feds, I would
| be investigating the possibility that the operators
| themselves sold the antenna for scrap...
| quesera wrote:
| > _I would be investigating the possibility that the
| operators themselves sold the antenna for scrap..._
|
| This might sound far-fetched to many, but it's a real
| thing. Galvanized steel has a decent scrap value. Taking
| down a tower is not a trivial project, but it happens.
|
| I was responsible for a 800-ft tower in a past life, and
| a pager, a 4x4 truck, and a gun were considered required
| equipment. I opted for the first two, but wasn't prepared
| to commit to the responsibilities of the third.
|
| The most common theft scenario was an equipment smash-
| and-grab. But tower thefts were not unheard of.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > tower thefts were not unheard of.
|
| US? I'm guessing you mean smaller towers like ~50' used
| for local links, utility radios, etc. Or do you mean like
| 75' or 150'+? Do people grab commercial towers?
| quesera wrote:
| Definitely US.
|
| Small towers are much easier, but big towers get hit
| sometimes too. Usually when they are in a transitioning
| period (new, major maintenance, decomm) because the
| bigger the tower, typically the more antennas are on it,
| and the more parties who will notice it's disappearance
| quickly.
| antonvs wrote:
| > It is not legal to operate a remote transmitter site
| without full telemetry coming back to a human
|
| Have you ever worked for a smaller company? Compliance is
| a thing you do on paper, that has very little to do with
| the real world.
| quesera wrote:
| I have, but never for a company that didn't care whether
| their signal was propagating.
|
| Nor for a company that didn't have some level of fear of
| being fined by the FCC for non-compliance.
|
| Things may be different in small-market rural!
|
| But the economics of "not knowing" that your station is
| off-air are impossible.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Which is why I trust corporations more than small
| businesses. Big companies can't cut corners in quite the
| same way as tiny shops, nor can they directly violate
| health&safety regulations, creating health risk for
| customers, without fear of consequences.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Big companies can't cut corners in quite the same way
| as tiny shops,
|
| Big companies have their own distinct ways, true. They
| have massive resources to deploy against regulation and
| oversight. By forestalling accountability or insuring it
| results in disproportionately small fines, they can
| insure non-compliance is strongly profitable. This
| satisfies the interests that matter most to a public
| corp, execs and investors.
|
| > Big companies can't ... directly violate health&safety
| regulations, creating health risk for customers, without
| fear of consequences.
|
| This is a bold declaration.
| thanksgiving wrote:
| At least I would not knowingly commit crimes so the
| private equity makes some tens of thousands of dollars
| and I get a "meets expectations" and 2% annual raise at
| best if doing so could put me at risk of going to prison.
| wsh wrote:
| > It is not legal to operate a remote transmitter site
| without [...]
|
| 47 CFR SS 73.1400(b) permits operation with "a self-
| monitoring or ATS-monitored and controlled transmission
| system that, _in lieu of contacting a person designated
| by the licensee_ , automatically takes the station off
| the air within three hours of any technical malfunction
| which is capable of causing interference" (emphasis
| added).
|
| This doesn't change the licensee's basic responsibility
| "for assuring that at all times the station operates
| [...] in accordance with the terms of the station
| authorization," of course.
|
| > in what ways were they operating noncompliantly?
|
| If the station was off the air and the licensee didn't
| notify the FCC within 10 days and seek a silent STA
| within 30 days, that would violate 47 CFR SS
| 73.1740(a)(4).
| geerlingguy wrote:
| It's not that hard, and most of the smaller AM and FM
| facilities I've seen (ones where snakes nest on top of
| the transmitter and wild turkeys try to chase off the
| engineer the one time a year the tower gets a visit)
| still have some sort of monitor. Plus... especially with
| AM, there's always at least one old folk sitting there
| with it on 24-7. It's usually a race between the engineer
| and that older person to see who calls the studio or
| owner first!
| quesera wrote:
| Yes! I loved those guys. They were always guys. :)
| sitkack wrote:
| I have called my local station about dead air a couple
| times. I was the first to tell them. One time in recent
| memory, it went on for so long that I forgot the radio
| was on when they came back.
| dylan604 wrote:
| In some markets, they are still operating off of NTSC tape
| formats and equipment. They have a device to upres the
| content to HD right before going to the transmitter. All
| because they are in such a small market, and there's not
| enough money to justify buying HD equipment.
|
| Everyone seems to think that TV stations are all on the
| same level of the flagships for each network. Some of them
| still are less than what you'd see in the movie UHF.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I still don 't buy it. _
|
| Agreed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqIysr3o_vY is a
| video of some people exploring the site.
|
| The guy ropes and fallen fences are overgrown, the
| electricity meter has clearly been missing for months at
| the very least. There's no evidence like crushed plants
| indicating the tower having fallen any time recently.
|
| The station's FM license was part of an FCC scheme to
| improve the economics of struggling AM stations, and
| because the aim was to _strengthen_ AM not _replace_ it,
| the license requires them to continue broadcasting on AM.
|
| My guess is they've been broadcasting in violation of that
| license for years, someone called them on it, and they had
| to concoct this "stolen tower" story to cover that up.
| shagie wrote:
| https://nypost.com/2024/02/11/news/alabama-radio-station-
| wjl...
|
| > The Jasper, Alabama, station was ordered off air by the
| Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as authorities
| continue to investigate how and why the heavy steel
| structure suddenly disappeared.
|
| > "In all my years of being in the business, around the
| business, everything like that, I have never seen
| anything like this," Elmore told The Post.
|
| > "You don't hear of a 200-foot tower being stolen," he
| added."
|
| > While the self-proclaimed "Sound of Walker County,"
| still has its FM transmitter and tower, it is not allowed
| to operate while the AM station is off the air, according
| to FCC.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The FCC is big, but no. They dont have surveillance vans
| scouting the country to confirm thag every radio station is
| actually transmitting. Im sure they might have reacted had
| someone told them of this apparant scam, but who is going to
| notice the absence of a small AM station these days?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Sounds like the type of thing that would be great for
| civilian volunteers to do. Amateur radio licensees already do
| a good job of self monitoring their bands. Maybe offer them
| some kind of recognition if they monitor a commercial station
| not living up to its license requirements. Probably could
| automate the whole thing with a Raspberry Pi and an SDR.
| myself248 wrote:
| You could automate the whole thing with zero additional
| hardware, just occasionally polling the existing kiwisdr
| network.
|
| You could also trilaterate the physical source of each
| frequency using TDoA, since all Kiwi samples are time-
| tagged with the integrated also-software-defined GPS
| receiver.
|
| Generate alerts if a licensed-stationary source appears to
| move, etc..?
|
| Track high-power CB abusers?
|
| The sky's the limit, just someone has to care, and be good
| with software, and both of those things have to overlap in
| the same person.
| diggan wrote:
| > It is hard to imagine the FCC wouldn't notice that there was
| no signal on that AM station for that amount of time, or the
| owner, or the power company.
|
| Maybe the typical approach of having flaky monitoring and after
| enough time, you simply chalk it up to "well, seems the
| monitoring is offline again, but no one is complaining so
| probably the thing still works"?
|
| Alternatively, the owner did notice it was missing, but
| reporting it as missing would also mean they have to shut down
| FM service, so they left it until someone complained/noticed.
| eastbound wrote:
| > so probably the thing still works"?
|
| I'm sure radio operators know this one weird trick to confirm
| that theory: Turn on your AM car radio.
| jacurtis wrote:
| You're confusing two different parties involved in the
| monitoring here: the FCC and the station owner.
|
| The station owner likely knew within a few hours to a few
| days that the tower went offline. At the very least the
| power bill would have been very low or non-existent that
| month which would make it pretty obvious. And to your point
| they could tune their FM radio to their station frequency
| and see if it works.
|
| The FCC is a federal organization. I doubt they have an
| office in Jasper Alabama. So the FCC monitoring is the one
| in question here. Because as soon as the FCC notices the AM
| station is down, then the FM translation (which is what the
| station was really marketed around and gaining its
| viewership from) is shut down. Which means the station
| owner is out of a job. The FCC's monitoring is probably not
| realtime and I could see someone at the FCC getting an
| alert that this AM station in Jasper Alabama is down and
| they do think to themselves the monitoring is bad or flaky
| and don't immediately panic. The FCC isn't going to be able
| to just tune their radio to the AM station to check since
| they aren't in range of the station.
| bombcar wrote:
| FCC just cares that the paperwork is filed and nobody
| complains.
|
| Just because you _have_ a license doesn 't mean you have to use
| it.
|
| > The radio station had an FCC license that required they
| operate an AM transmitter. Now that the FCC has found out that
| they are not broadcasting on AM, the station is not allowed to
| continue on FM.
|
| This (from the other thread) seems to be the pertinent part.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Your first two sentences are contradicted by the quote and
| your followup.
|
| Ues the FCC cares and yes they must use it, when using the FM
| teansmitter.
|
| The FCC most certainly should be monitoring these compliance
| requirements. I suspect someone at the FCC noticed they
| weren't transmitting, asked, then the owner claimed the just
| found out.. someone stole the tower!
| lupusreal wrote:
| It seems the AM station was missing for at least a year, so
| evidently the FCC wasn't paying very close attention. They
| probably didn't notice/care until somebody else brought it
| to their attention.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the situation
| was something along the lines of: they were having
| financial difficulties and decided they could get away
| with not broadcasting on AM...sold the tower and
| equipment for scrap. Eventually someone notices and
| notifies the FCC. FCC contacts the operator and
| eventually they send out a bush hog crew to make the
| "discovery".
| quesera wrote:
| This is the most plausible explanation I can imagine.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Indeed, which is the sort of scenario I eluded to.
|
| One thing we need to realize, that as computing types, we
| think of monitoring differently.
|
| Monitoring need not be real time. A yearly inspection can
| be done. Quarterly. Audits.
|
| Even grocery stores don't get daily or even weekly health
| inpections.
| quesera wrote:
| Well, that's true. But the FCC has clear regulations.
|
| Remote broadcast transmitter monitoring is explicitly
| real-time. Or it's non-compliant and subject to fines and
| license revocation.
| jacurtis wrote:
| How would they have realtime monitoring unless they have
| a receiver in every city in the country? This happened in
| Jasper Alabama, not Los Angeles California.
|
| I think its possible that they only send someone out once
| a year to check for active frequencies. When they see a
| problem (AM 1259 is missing) then they send out the brush
| crew.
|
| Point being, I highly doubt that realtime monitoring
| exists everywhere. The owner of this station probably
| banked on the fact that no one's watching Jasper Alabama
| that closely. When someone at the FCC gets their annual
| paperwork about this station, they probably just do a
| cursory check on it and push it through, not putting a
| lot of time or energy into this tiny station.
| quesera wrote:
| The FCC does not monitor stations at all.
|
| The station has an FCC-mandated responsibility for real-
| time and responsive monitoring of their transmitters.
| quesera wrote:
| The FCC cares, but they do not monitor.
|
| They do not have the resources or the coverage to monitor
| broadcasters.
| quesera wrote:
| Actually you are obligated to use a license, or to return it.
| You cannot hold a license for the AM/FM/TV broadcast bands
| and not operate on it for any length of time.
| fhars wrote:
| As a comparison value: in Germany, you can loose your FM
| license for inactivity if you broadcast 90 seconds of
| silence. We had to care for stuff like this when we did
| some remote discussion rounds on community radio during the
| pandemic and had to have some logic close to the
| transmitter that would add innocuous background music if
| anything went wrong upstream.
| quesera wrote:
| Dead air is a very big deal in the US too. The argument
| is something like "licensees exist to serve the public
| and obviously dead air does not serve, but more
| importantly means that a listener might stay tuned into
| silence when an emergency alert is broadcast over all
| other stations".
|
| It's sort of tenuous, although not wrong. Off-air is a
| better state than dead air.
| gosub100 wrote:
| in the 90s I remember 2-3 songs that had a couple seconds
| of dead-air, and the stations would modify them to play
| cheesy sound effects during that time. I always thought
| they were paranoid about someone changing the channel,
| but now I think it is more to be compliant.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Just because you have a license doesn't mean you have to
| use it.
|
| Um, what? Please, show me where the license agreement says
| this.
| StayTrue wrote:
| https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/special-temporary-
| authority#....
|
| An operator is allocated radio spectrum so stands to reason
| it's use-it-or-lose-it.
| fortran77 wrote:
| > Just because you have a license doesn't mean you have to
| use it
|
| This is completely untrue for broadcast licenses.
| chefandy wrote:
| The photos only seem to show that there wasn't a 'standing'
| tower there. Maybe it fell and not enough people listened to
| notice the drastically degraded signal, and the owners just
| didn't care?
|
| I don't really get the regulatory aspect, but they're seemingly
| only operating this AM station as some sort of stipulation for
| their FM license? If that's true, why do people care? Why does
| the FCC care?
| Larrikin wrote:
| If it's a requirement why don't you care that they are
| running a scam?
| vel0city wrote:
| For commercial AM, especially for a tower like this,
| typically the whole tower is an unshielded, energized
| antenna. If it fell over it would be shorting to ground and
| probably not transit much of anything at all.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| Here's a video where two guys visit the site of where the antenna
| was supposed to be. Vegitation overgrowth of the remains suggest
| it's been at least one growing season since it was removed. Looks
| like it was inopperational well before that.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=78PvlGCqM84
| lisper wrote:
| Unedited version:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqIysr3o_vY
|
| But apparently they went to the wrong site. According to [1],
| the WJLX tower was next to another tower (for WIXI) which is
| still standing, but that second tower is not visible anywhere
| in the video.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39413347
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| The WIXI site, 0.35 miles away, has a white building [1] [2]
| [3]. One-third of a mile distance in a forested area is a
| reasonable distance to not see the WIXI tower from the
| ground.
|
| I'm pretty sure the YouTube video is at the correct location.
| It's clearly not at WIXI.
|
| [1] WIXI: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CM1MwZBCDnCQgtUH7
|
| [2] WIXI zoomable map: https://fccdata.org/?facid=&call=WIXI
|
| [3] WJLX zoomable map: https://fccdata.org/?facid=&call=wjlx
|
| Edit to add: I went through every AM station listed at
| https://fccdata.org/?lang=en&latd=33.8549&lond=87.2707 and
| there are no other AM stations in that region.
| lisper wrote:
| > It's clearly not at WIXI.
|
| Well, yeah, that is not in dispute. The question is: how do
| we know they were at the WJLX site and not just some random
| abandoned building in the middle of nowhere?
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| That's a fair and reasonable question to ask.
|
| Here is video of an unrelated party filming the WJLX
| transmission site 11 years ago:
| https://youtu.be/l1Srg9WEPzw?si=CVBcR3MrZ4BiaZgc
|
| The video from 11 years ago matches the site in the new
| video.
| michaelt wrote:
| Compare the building from the video to the photo released by
| the radio station: https://imgur.com/a/Qj9Aqaj
|
| Looks like the same place to me.
| js2 wrote:
| Edit: wrong tower per reply from js2wjlxam. Correct tower
| (satellite view):
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/mf1D1Cdfy9Pz6wjp7
|
| The one I've linked below is:
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/7XRGG5cpHqixVkPB9
|
| ---
|
| Original comment:
|
| Here's the best street view of it I've found from when it was
| still standing in June 2022. At that time it seems to be in
| pretty good shape:
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/CbCZSEcHn6NJnP649
|
| It looks to me like the power pole in this view is also the
| tower's source of power.
| js2wjlxam wrote:
| That is not the correct tower.
|
| See
| https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1aqc0pq/how_one_man...
| thih9 wrote:
| When I read "wrong tower" at the top, I thought the submission
| was about the wrong tower.
|
| It took me a while to figure out that only the link later in
| the parent's comment is wrong.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Supposedly not insurance fraud but perhaps it's crisis fraud or
| crowdfunding fraud for a tiny radio station that cannot sustain
| itself economically.
| mikey_p wrote:
| Called this as being fishy back when it first came up on HN, and
| ended up getting downvoted:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39328406
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