They stole the WHOLE TOWER?!
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- Опубліковано 20 сер 2024
- The 200 foot radio tower for WJLX-AM in Alabama went missing.
Is there more to this story? It seems like a lot of information is missing from early news reports-and just what is an FM translator, anyway? We'll cover all that in this video!
More info and articles mentioned in the video:
- WJLX 101.5 FM (1240 AM) website: www.wjlx1015.com
- FCC AM Station Profile for WJLX: publicfiles.fc...
- Coverage from CNN: www.cnn.com/20...
- Discussion on Reddit: / alabama_station_in_dis...
- Discussion on Radio Discussions: www.radiodiscu...
- Video of AM transmitter off air (2013): • Radio Station (WJLX AM...
Support me on Patreon: / geerlingguy
Sponsor me on GitHub: github.com/spo...
Merch: redshirtjeff.com
Main Channel: / jeffgeerling
**Update** (Feb 14): UA-camr @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: ua-cam.com/video/bqIysr3o_vY/v-deo.html (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.
Exactly. In my 20s, MAYBE me and a buddy could take down a 200ft ROHN 25 tower, load 20 sections, clean up and drag ourselves home, but this is another animal. IMO was sold for whatever reason, either by the company or some other people who realized it might not be missed for a while, but one day? I think not. It most likely is in service somewhere else and not sold for scrap.
The electricity meter had been removed. The electricity company servicing that site should be able to tell when the site last used any electricity.
Based upon the video, there hasn't been a tower on that site for months if not years. The station owner was probably about to get caught by the FCC with his pants down and concocted the "theft" story to cover his derriere. The electric meter base is a dead giveaway; someone needs to call the local power company and ask when the power bill dropped off or service was disconnected.
Looks like it failed from neglect. I didn't watch the whole video but it was the saddest looking transmitter site.
Looks like it hadn't been touched in decades. My bet is that the guy wires failed and the tower went down.
Landscapers were called, guy wires stuck in equipment.
Guys, I've lived just north of Jasper for my entire 54 years of life. I'm in a sales job where I communicate daily with a huge swath of the surrounding county's population and I'm not hearing anything about the true story behind this. But I'm listening all day every day, an eternal supply of popcorn in hand, and if I hear anything I'll post it here.
The comment about the scrapping possibility caught my ear. Knowing personally the owners of the largest go-to scrap facility in the city (and having talked to their head mechanic today), they haven't seen evidence of the structure going through their site. Again...listening lol.
I'll say that since I was a teenager I've heard that the station was "going under". Always seemed to be on the very brink of insolvency, and actually did shut down for periods over the years, only to be brought back online by somebody with some $$$ and a dream. I have no idea of the true financial status of the station or of any of the principals, but I've learned that everywhere people are good at doing bad things.
Decades ago, I was a DJ on an FM station. The transmitter shut down during my shift. Our station engineer was calling me within 5 minutes. I don't understand how the lawn mowers were the first to discover this.
I have worked at a few radio stations. Alarms sound and text messages and emails get sent if the Studio to Transmitter Link goes down. We currently have more sophisticated monitoring that will alert if there are transmitter problems of any sort, but I don't understand how any commercial radio station doesn't monitor at least the STL.
I agree I also worked at a AM station that had a remote FM station transmitter miles from the studio and they monitored the over the air signal for both stations.
They didn't know because they didn't have an off air monitoring system in the first place. And that didn't matter because the station had been off for months, if not years, prior to this theft. They've been breaking various FCC rules for years. Whether it's due to ignorance or malice, I don't know. But in all likelihood they're facing a license revocation if it can't be proved they were on the air during the past year. That's a pretty hard and fast rule the FCC has little sympathy for violating.
They werent, theyre hitting for funding. Show me a before and after picture of the site.
Jeff's dad was being very circumspect, but the whole thing smells like the station was very loosely run to say the least.
The fact that the tower was taken, along with everything in the building, tells me either it was an epic scrap haul, or someone knew what it was, and it's heading somewhere else to be used by someone else.
Unless you did it with a helicopter or very slowly a segment at a time lowering it in the reverse of construction I don't think re-using the tower is going to be a thing.
Agreed. The fact the owners didn't realize the tower and repeater were down, it must not be that big of a deal. That'd be unreal if someone actually did steal one haha
Agreed. It wasn't stolen for scrap. It was stolen because someone wants to set up a communications tower but either lacked their own funds to do it or they want to stay off the radar by not leaving a paper trail of expensive and obvious purchases that may raise suspicion in certain circles.
Probably on it’s way to some remote jungle.
or....meth
In unrelated news, a nearby Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane helicopter was reportedly upsetting the chickens at the poultry farm...
🤣 Underrated comment!
Rumor is they've been laying scrambled eggs.
@@jim9930actual conspiracy theory right here
Yeah, that's the one the put the transmitter on top of the CN tower in Tronna. They were squealing in Hog Town that day.
Cue _Flight of The Valkyries._ 😉
Saw another report today, William Colliers channel. The reporter visited the site of the tower. It has been gone for years by the look of the place. The guy wires are on the ground and grown over with years of weeds. The building that housed the broadcasting equipment is a rotting mess. The owner owes money to just about everybody he does business with. It was not stolen.
Jewish lightning. Either he sold it off or the tower fell down because the guys were rusty, and he had no insurance. So either he buys a new tower, or ignores the license violation until somebody (groundskeeper) calls the cops reporting a missing tower, so he reports a 'stolen' tower.
sounds like insurance fraud to me
Dude runs a failing business whose only remaining assets are the physical hardware.
"Um, somebody stole it all. And we had no insurance on any of that. Please donate."
Uh huh.
@@Rutherford_Inchworm_III the guy makes money off local ads on his FM station. But his FM license is dependent on maintaining an AM license and broadcasting. The FM is still broadcasting and I listen to it when I’m in Jasper area. Its an FCC thing about the license requirement so unless he is replacing the AM antenna I don’t understand how he is still broadcasting. Your tax dollars NOT at work most likely.
@@martinswiney2192so what I'm guessing is happening is a bad businessman bought the radio station as an income stream, realised it wasn't worth it, milked it for as long as he could as cheap as possible and when he wasn't allowed to shut down AM to just make more money he stages a heist to get donation money from people who like the station. Sounds like every company in modern society.
if a 200 foot tower would magically appear in my backyard I wouldn't complain
I wouldn't complain to i will use it for rc cars
@@thomas1000official Screw that! I would use it for RC submarines.
@@appliedengineering4001 good idea
Air dry clothes? 👻
I'd place a 7 element log periodic for 20M, but the HOA would complain
I have a 5kw transmitting tube on the shelf in my den. Anybody who tries to steal it is gonna have to get past my cat.
damn thts some scary precaution
That was their mistake in Alabama.
Wow- Little over kill I think 😲😁😂
Is it a big cat? Asking for a friend,... 😂
That's cool. Have a party and share with your neighbors.
I'm from Jasper and have some friends-of-friends in local entertainment, and let's just say the broadcasting scene around here has never been... normal. The saga of Terry Keith Hammond is really something to behold, and largely a matter of public record. There are FCC memorandums about his denied request for licensure that are amusing to read. Took the local authorities on a wild goose chase a few years ago and served a while in the local jail for theft, during which he received an extended sentence after hatching an honest-to-god terror plot. And that's all just one guy. Jasper's not a fun place to live, but I do get the exhilarating experience of hearing about local happenings from non-local news sources on a pretty regular basis, so it's got that going for it.
What do you know about James Don Early, the current license holder?
I learned that name at the same time as everyone else paying attention to this story, unfortunately. I'm not aware that he has any public facing roles at the station the way Brett, their business manager, does. The prevailing wisdom around town is, as I suspected it would be, that the above-mentioned Mr. Hammond is responsible. I think that's fanciful, to be honest, and yeah, asking Early and Elmore some choice questions seems like a more fruitful line of investigation. This gets into "I can't say this in my small town Facebook-o-sphere without getting yelled at" territory, but even if every word of what the station is saying was true, I'd still find their trying to use the listening public as a no-premium insurance policy distasteful... and I don't think every word of what the station is saying is true.@@ki5aok
The station is so popular, nobody knew it was gone and radio station wasn't on the air until landscapers went out. LMAO
If you had the choice between listening to oldies music on AM 1240 or FM 101.5 in stereo, which would you choose?
If were used to listening on AM, would you just tune in to FM or Internet?
Sounds fishy to me.
The AM equivalent to an insurance fire lol
they had no insurance
If the FCC would allow them to convert to FM only. They have a world-wide oldies hit station on their streaming site. Time to monetize some revenue off of that.
@@WA4OSH only world wide because it's on the web. If nobody tunes in there then there's still no $$ to be had.
@@rupe53 I think we were talking about several different things: Station RF coverage (it's only a Class-C station), Station streaming coverage (worldwide) and the media coverage of this story (worldwide)
@@WA4OSH yes, we are. I mentioned world-wide listeners... on the web. You still need numbers to get $$ from advertisers... or charge a subscription fee. The money needs to come from somewhere.
They mentioned "without a trace" but if you read the message @1:28 you can see that the bush hog crew reported that "wires are scattered everywhere". Not sure if they were talking about loose small wire or the larger guide wires?
Ah good catch - maybe they should've quoted the bush hog crew rather than the station manager in that report!
guy, not guide
I do feel that "without a trace" means they have no clue where it went. I'm sure there's evidence left at the site.... unless it's Sheriff Taylor and Barney Fife investigating.
‘Without a trace’ means there is no evidence to WHO committed the crime, it does NOT mean there is no evidence that a crime was committed .
It can also mean that there is no evidence as to WHERE someone or something went.
In olden times, the ‘trace’ signified the track that a person left, which could be followed by a human ‘tracker’ (reading the signs, such as foot tracks or disturbed ground/vegetation) or a dog (bloodhound smelling the trail).
@@ernestgalvan9037 you didn't read my post from yesterday where I stated most of that already?
I used to work in radio part time. It was a requirement to call the tower daily and get a status report of its condition for the FCC log. Everything from the tower lights to operation temperature was relayed back from the transmitter when you called it.
Yup. But if the station is not running at night, the only thing that matters are the tower lights, right? The transmitter telemetry is just going to tell you the transmitter is off as expected.
@WA4OSH there are videos of this AM transmitter off before during the day. For days at a time. They were just using the FM translater. That is a FCC no no.
If the tower height was rounded up to 200 feet, the FAA/FCC doesn't require lighting unless the location makes it a hazard to aviation. Only towers 200 feet & over are routinely required to have lighting.
This! @@wizardgmb
@@wizardgmb It probably was 195ft and not lit. The airport appears to be on the north side of town.
An interesting thing is if you use google street view from the interstate, a bit west of where the interstate crosses the railroad tracks, and look north towards the tower, the past street views you can see two towers, this one and it's neighbor to the North. June 2022 is the last date they both show, March 2023 and January 2024 you only see one tower.
🤔
Muhaha
If you use Google 3D you can see both the WWWB-AM and the WJLX-AM towers. The towers look like they lean to the East and the shadows are long to the West. (the picture must have been taken in the morning) That's generated from a Landsat satellite image dated 2024.
This whole thing smells fishy beyond a simple theft
What part of a tower theft is simple?
@@WA4OSH not sure if you're being funny, but simple theft is a legal term. Their point they're trying to make is this seems like a more complex scheme (for example, I saw a comment saying the owners stole it themselves to bring in GoFundMe money).
@@PsRohrbaugh I hope I don't sound funny in my posts. That was not my intention. Some people may have speculated that they stole the gear themselves. That's certainly not what I think happened.
When you find a whole ass Radio tower on Ebay...
@@MihkelKukk eBay: "200-foot AM antenna SLIGHT DAMAGE - For Parts Only"
I've been waiting for you guys to cover this since I hear the story on the news. If ever there was a story for Geerling Engineer, this is it.
I hope you both do drive down there this weekend and investigate what traces actually exist of the theft.
Near me, we had a tower that was not used after crooks broke in and took all the repeaters (7) in the building. The owner was formerly the local RCA dealer. It sat unused for years and finally the land was sold. This was 180 feet of Rohn 25 with 7 runs of 7'/8 and 7 antennas. Since it had sat idle, the guy wires were sagging. The real estate folks had a hard time getting anyone to take it down. They finally got some local ham radio guys to come get it in exchange for having the tower. They had to tighten the guy wires first, then bring it down and haul it off. The building the RCA guy had was much like the one in your video, but smaller. Do keep us advised.
I'm sure a 200 ft. tower would be nice for HAM radio antenna farm, some CB'er, cartel dudes needing towers for their own clandestine DMR network or some pirate broadcaster (1710-1750 MHz) or right below the 40 meter band. I listened to one last night broadcasting trance music on 6930 MHz over the Internet (they're somewhere near Miami, FL).
@@WA4OSH Oh, WRMI ?? 😆
@@garysmith8455 Gary, WRMI is broadcasting out of (North of) Okeechobee, FL with 50kW and 5kW and are located between Sebring and Ft Pierce, FL. And certainly they're not broadcasting in a Land Mobile/aviation band.
Search for "Wideband shortwave radio receiver map - Linkfanel" then click on any of the WebSDRs on the map. One of the places pirates broadcast is right below the 40m HAM band 6950 - 7000 kHz. I had the best reception with the WebSDR in Kendall, FL. Maybe this pirate will be on the air again later tonight. There's a nice carrier on 6930 kHz right now. 2/11/24 01:45 UTC
@@garysmith8455 Radio Free Whatever. Somewhere on the East Coast.
@@garysmith8455 AM1710 near Birmingham AL
The elites don’t want you to know this but the towers at the station are free. You can take them home. I have 458 towers.
Haha! If only... our little ham shacks would all be decked out!
@@jim9930 For some, definitely-but many of these AM tower sites are way out in rural parts, where the population density is better served other ways. There are still small cell towers but a lot of the AM facilities are in pretty poor condition, not nice enough any of the cellular companies would want to colocate their equipment.
@@JeffGeerling One station near Leesburg Florida was in the middle of nowhere when it was built. As the area grew, they ended up with a mall between them and Hwy 441. Their tower is in a large marsh, full of alligators. The last time I was there, they were still fiddling with an old Gates BC5000 It needed replaced, but the group of owners only cared about splinting each month's profit.
I often saw and heard lightning strike that towr from many miles away, but it went silent for about three seconds each time, if it did come back.
Just like the call signs on qrz
@@GeerlingEngineeringtower sites and building sites became greedy land lords when Nextel came along and started offering stupid high rents to the owners of these sites. This resulted in the owners demanding high rents from everyone else on the site and many times operators could not afford the new rents. Nextel also started complaining about interference from the smaller operators which was many times a false accusation. This allowed them to have a secure site all to their own when the rest of the operators vacated the sites. It boils down to money. By filing these false complaints it forced smaller repeater operators to close down. This would send their customers to Nextel for radio service.
As for Ham Radio repeaters, yes there are some operators and clubs can not afford high rents or all of the necessary filter equipment to prevent inter modulation issues at a site. Many times filter cans, transmitter circulators, dummy loads can be purchased second hand at reasonable costs, tuned to the transmitters signal and installed to prevent interference with co operators on the site.
As a radio station they need to be able to broadcast EAS test alerts weekly, so they have to have some way to know the test is going out, yet this sounds like they didn't know that either if they didn't know the tower was gone. They could end up with some heft fines in addition to the costs of replacing the tower and transmitter.
According to the FCC database, during their 2017 license renewal, there was an objection filed that stated the EAS equipment wasn't working properly and that the owner knew it for a long time. The objection was dismissed when the owner presented EAS logs.
@@ki5aok EAS logs never lie?
@@jamesvandamme7786 Personally, I would be suspicious myself if they suddenly showed up in order, but that's the government for you. Apparently it doesn't take much to convince the FCC.
Having worked around this industry early in my career, there is just no way it disappeared without a trace. This is hugely suspicious, and the push to keep that FM translator on the air, coupled with several reports I have seen about the a.m. transmitter regularly not operating, don’t help my suspicion index. This has become an international story very quickly, so you know people have got to be on that site right now and I can’t wait to see some pictures.
International story, does that imply the thieves were from another country?
If the story is known outside of the US, it's now an international story. Don't overthink it.
So, when an AM station goes off the air at midnight or 1 AM, we need to mobilize the National Guard? Boy, are taxes gonna go up!
... no one listens to AM anymore... usually just mindless 'talk radio' (if you like partisan political discussions) or religious programming ( your soul will be saved if you give us plenty of money)... AM transmitters, the cost of power, and their upkeep, some final tubes are getting really expensive (at lower 1kw power levels they are in high demand from ham radio operators for their linea amps), if you can even find replacements in the dwindling NOS tube stockpile... you used to be able to get some from Russia but that source has dried up. AM transmitters are just money pits..
@@spvillano AM stations that are licensed to daytime only will go off the air at sunset and stay off till sunrise.
Sounds like an inside job right here lol
It was outside; too big to be inside. 😉
Heh, nice #dadjoke
Definitely agree with you I feel the same way they are using go fund me to scam for more money
@@GeerlingEngineeringthe homeless deserve the 60,000 I need 3 to 5 to get a RV to live in since I got evicted from my apartment could you help ?
@@rockradstone 🤣
200' is a short to medium height tower. If it was Rohn 55G sized (about 17" on a side, can be up to 400' with guying), each 10' section weighs about 100 pounds, so you're looking somewhere around a ton. Let's say 2 tons for the sake of argument. Any flat bed equipment trailer can easily handle the weight. Box truck and a truck with equipment trailer roll in just before dusk, cut power to the transmitter, cut one of the guy sets to set the fall direction, and down she goes. A couple of oxyacetylene torches to cut it into 10' or 20' sections and load up the equipment trailer while another team of 2 guys start gutting the building. They're not taking this to sell on eBay or Marketplace, they're going to scrap it, so the condition doesn't matter. I can see this being done in under 8 hours. Now if you wanted to take it down so it's still usable, then yeah, there's no way.
Does the scrapping theory make sense? Not really, because let's say scrap steel is at $0.07/lb and they get 5000 pounds total. That's only $350. So an inside job does seem more likely. And why are they raising money on GoFundMe? Was this facility not insured? That'd be somewhat surprising, and an insurance claim would be far more lucrative. As for notification if the transmitter went down, that's easily explained. Poorly run station, occurs at night, they're not going to worry about it until at least the next morning, although apparently it was longer than that. But who knows, they may not of even had any remote monitoring if it's that old and poorly run. I'm sure most of this has been speculated on the forums, but that's just my take.
They mentioned in the GoFundMe the transmitter site wasn't insured. But yeah...
looking at the "silence issues" the fcc has documented, it really smells of an inside "oh maybe no one will notice if this is gone" misguided endeavor. The fact the station's website touts the fm and makes little to no mention (until the tower "mystery") of AM really makes me wonder what did they know and WEHEN did they know it...
@JCWren all of what you say makes sense.
1) Scrapping theory ... tweakers or metal thieves would have taken only the copper. The tweakers would probably not know much about a copper ground radial plane buried all around the tower. It's hard to pull out of the ground. The bent tower after felling it is worthless. I've recently watched a video where some guys removed a 200ft cell tower from a mountain top in the middle of a snow storm. Flatbed equipment trailer with a crane worked for them.
2) Inside job? They say that the equipment was uninsured. It's hard to insure a 70 year old steel tower and probably 40 year old transmitter. The property is probably worth more than insuring the tower. If the tower fell, there's nothing around. It looks like they took that risk. Claim on the insurance? This makes no sense. In the end, $60,000 is very minimum. They will need much more than that. Commercial loans are extremely prohibitive.
3) A 200ft tower for export to a third-world country with an AM transmitter. There may be demand for this. Can you fit it all into a 53ft shipping container? 10 x 20ft sections with ample room for transmitter and other racks. Could it be dismantled overnight? Where it goes, nobody knows. (Ren and Stimpy?)
4) My theory: 1610-1730 kHz stolen to become an AM Medium-wave pirate station or right below the 40 meter band (6875-7000 kHz).
How might they have done it? From their webpage it looks like they broadcast till midnight and resume at 8:00am. As a Class-C 1KW station on AM, they may even have to power down to 250W at night depending who else is on that graveyard frequency. According to Wikipedia "the station, which has gone dark several times throughout the last few years due to deferred maintenance" I suspect that no one may have missed the AM signal while it was being dismantled. If you look at a Google map, you would not have to take the road by the chicken plant, but through the woods on the south side.
@JCWren ..5) A second conspiracy theory: If the AM transmitter and antenna got stolen, then maybe if the FCC would let them convert to FM only, not just a translator... no AM transmitter site necessary. A nice piece of land right next to the Mar-Jac poultry plant might make a good trailer park for the workers. Land is upwards of 10K an acre. The area is wooded and outside the city limits. Nahhh. It's just west northwest of a sewage treatment plant.
scrap in the SE right now is about 11 cents, so closer to 500 bucks, plus all the copper which would easily be near a grand.. but this still screams inside job, too much risk for less than 2 grand. Also most scrap ops cut the lines and drop the tower, then just steel all the copper, can be done in less than a few hours and would give a decent pay for not a ton of work
I'm from nearby and witnessed a discussion among a few radio (ham and broadcast) people from even closer to jasper.
they haven't heard from the actual tower owner and license holder yet (its not elmore mentioned in the articles)
apparently there has been drama in "the jasper broadcast scene"
filling in these blanks makes me assume the owner might have something to do with it, but I nobody else has outright said that.
allegedly the FCC had noticed the translator had been operational without the AM being on air a while back.
Very interesting. It's going to be interesting to separate the conspiracy theories from the provable facts. It's not hard to get the translator to see an AM signal from a small solid state transmitter you can buy off of E-Bay.
@@WA4OSH You don't even have to do that. Run a digital line to the translator site and you can feed it content directly.
I believe the FM site also has cell phone antennas attached (they are below the FM radials), so a fiber line is already there. The FM site is west of Jasper and the AM site is south. AM site looks very remote while the FM site is off a main highway.
@@ki5aok The 1240 kHz AM site is located at 33.815114, -87.271840 Walker County, Alabama and the FM translator site, W268BM, on 101.5 MHz is located at 33° 50' 29.4" N+ 087° 18' 40.0" W- according to their STA application 0000238539 dated 2/7/2024 FRN 0028917623 They are licensed for a smoking 250W ERP. (Near 1181 S Skyline Dr, Dunn Construction Company) Incidentally, there's a PDF of a police report filed on the bottom of the application.
The Cellphone tower that you refer to is located at 33.840576, -87.310335. Definitely, they have to have a fiber to the cell site, but I don't think you really need fiber.
IMHO, all you need is a good, reliable cable Internet connection for the STL. If you look at Google earth from the road, there's power and what appears to be cable or ADSL service to the site. Modern FM transmitters takes an MPX composite input. I'm not familiar with translators that are supposed to be listening for the AM station input and then transmitting on FM.
Glad to see your dad back always enjoy listening to him because I love broadcast transmitters (especially tube type am)
gotta love eqpt you can open the doors and go inside
Maybe they set out a long wire antenna to keep the station on the air, then got the tower down at their leisure.
They then remove the long wire along with the transmitter once the hard disassembly work was done, that way there could be only minutes between going off the air and fully clearing out.
Wow. That's brilliant! A long wire would have kept them on the air. Their ATU (Antenna Tuning Unit) would have had a fit with the change in impedance. But that happens regularly with stations that are located in swamps. This way, the disassembly work would have been during the day time. At midnight, the longwire disappears. Clever!
It didn't need to be a long wire. Why do that when a self resonant cut length of wire would work nicely?
@@joewoodchuck3824 and at 1.430MHz how long is a dipole? 468ft/f(MHz). And a 1/4 wave resonant vertical is how long? Can a shorter length of wire resonate?
@@WA4OSH Almost any length can be used with a matching network.
It appears that the owners "stole" their own stuff in order to have a reason to launch a fundraising campaign.
A lot of missing facts. We had a gentleman that would take old mobile homes. Salvage the outer skin, then burn the unit and pick the wiring out of the ashes. He figured out that AM towers have hundreds of feet of copper ground plane wire buried under the ground around them and started digger the wires up. He got by with one. But the second tower having the wires cut set off an SWR alarm. KAAY 1090 Little Rock, AR was for a long time having stuff stolen from their falling in transmitter building and their was reports of ground plane wires being dug up. Their was times you couldn't hear the station in Little Rock the transmit power was so low.
A fundraising campaign they lose 5% right off the top of?
@@2148aa 1975~1978 while in central Missouri I listened to KAAY as well as WLS 890 AM from Chicago. 🙂
It is fishy. If it were thieves, maybe they'd steal all the ground equipment and as much wiring as possible. Maybe they'd even climb to get more. But the amount of work and risk required to topple a tower and dismantle it is just...it doesn't pass the smell test. Especially for the price of stolen steel, which I presume is cheaper than regular steel.
Scrap dealers are routinely visited by the cops and told to BOLO for specific material. They routinely cooperate with the police because fencing stolen scrap is still fencing. In a small-ish town, someone is talking. Taking it elsewhere has the problem of...you know...moving a 200' radio tower that you stole across state lines. Thieves could burn all the copper and somewhat disguise it. But 12 tons (or whatever) of steel lattice? Come on.
And to the guy who pointed out that GoFundMe takes 5%, that's true. They take 5% of that sweet cash money that replaced a crummy old AM tower. It's a great deal for anyone who wants $60k for a cheaper replacement and a bunch of drugs. I don't mean to slander the victim here. Maybe they truly got got. But I think any detective will share my concerns.
Or they're insured and the gofundme is just a bonus :)
"without a trace"?!? I have to go with the alien abduction theory.
Ran out of cows apparently.
Having helped lower and raise just a 60 ft ham tower, there's no way a 200 ft tower just disappears, over-night, without a trace.
@@dwgray9000 200ft up in the air is a lot further than 200ft along the ground ;-P
Inside job to scam for money
I helped remove this one for a widow... it took us 10 hours of hard physical labor. Tower went to the W0AIH contest site, I sold the VHF+ antennas. i.imgur.com/Nw6DB37.jpg
Not impossible but it's the kind of thing that requires ocean 11 style planning with a big crew. I'm sure if you gave the right people a year to plan and practice an overnight theft it could be done.
I mean you can jack it down in pieces rather than going up into the air. Say you broke it up into 20 foot sections you need 10 cuts.
Aliens ;-)
If the station's electric meter is monitored in near real time (the one on my house is read daily), it would be interesting to see when their power usage suddenly dropped.
Sounds like it was dark for years. The only chance is they carted away the steel.
low power stations generally go off the air at night. OTOH, I doubt they could have carted it all away in a single night.
@@cashewABCD They were operating an FM translator which receives the AM signal and re-broadcasts it on FM. If the AM transmitter were down, they would have lost their FM transmissions as well.
@oliverscratch You have a good point here. Is the power completely shut-off when an AM transmitter is shut down for the night? No. The studio to transmitter link and the telemetry equipment would still be lit. Depending on the station engineer, and the transmitter manufacturer's operating instructions, the transmitter and modulator filament power may still have been running. AC in the transmitter shack is probably needed to control the humidity in the building as well as temperature, etc. The electric company would have a record as to when the transmitter shack power was cut.
@@WA4OSH do we even know if the power was completely cut? Did they leave the door open with the HVAC running? Details are needed here to know more about the situation.
wow the screen capture you show of the gofundme page shows them stating "unfortunately the tower site was not insured"....
...their primary license transmitter was uninsured? wonder if their FM site is insured...
also very good detective work finding the old previous example of their AM going off air.
the lack of monitoring is also really really curious; i don't know too many technical production environments where their realtime monitoring is "the landscapers"...
would be fascinating to see if there's any vegetation/ground indication of a felled tower; but then again, perhaps those signs may have been lost with the landscapers work - if there's no monitoring and no insurance, then what's the odds there's no fortnightly landscape maintenance and a huge vegetation growth may have momentarily buffered permanent indication. wow the more you look the more questions than answers!
thanks for the share.
I can understand why they didn't bother to get insurance on their 65 year old tower and probably 30+ year old transmitter. It's probably been completely devaluated and has zero scrap value.
ua-cam.com/video/DgRyXKZ9xZ0/v-deo.html
"...their primary license transmitter was uninsured?"
Yeah, I actually guffawed at that. What a low-rent scam. This is a 1kw oldies station in rural Alabama - the owner was merely hoping to fool his audience. Unfortunately it went national and now he's a laughingstock in addition to losing his license.
I have spent about 40 years visiting radio sites here in the UK, some sites are in poor condition but nothing like this. My armchair detective instinct thinks this station was dismantled before 2017. They appear to have been lying to the FCC for many years in order to keep the FM on the air.
I bet it was a Bonnie and Clyde duo between a Karen that thought it was a 5G tower, and a tweaker that sold it all for $20 in scrap.
Got news for that Karen: They're already working on 6G cellular. If they're worried about the RF, it's not the cell tower, but that phone right next to their ear. Got news for that tweaker: Bless your heart. Those drugs will take your life. Was it a duo like this? Heaven knows.
THE TOWER! THE TOWER! Rapunzel! Rapunzel! We are going to the tower. . .. .
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue
I got that reference.....also a movie reference.
This sounds suspicious enough to be an insurance job, conveniently on the heels of 95.5’s vandalized tower in Hugo, Oklahoma.
Rumors on Facebook are that they wanted to keep the translator going and ditch the AM tower, but the station has a thin budget to get the proper paperwork done.
They had no insurance.
They wouldn't have been able to do that, anyways...at least not according to the FCC rules. According to the rules, if the primary site ceases to broadcast, the translator site must go offline within 24 hours after primary signal failure. This makes sense since it sounds like the license holder did file a request to continue operation on the translator frequency (101.5 FM), but was denied by the FCC.
Thanks for doing this video with your dad. His knowledge made this a fun and informative video. I'm interested in where this story and tower lead.
I’ve seen the other video where he looked at the site. There hasn’t been a tower there for years. Someone’s going to jail when this is all done.
That being said, my buddy and I dismantled a 130’ Ham radio tower in just a few hours from the backyard of the operator’s widow. It was bolted together and we simply took it down piece by piece. Being from 1954 I’d guess that the tower was also bolted together. No need to topple it or cut it up. So, an overnight theft isn’t any sort of stretch.
Hey from Jasper!...Missouri. My communications/telecommunications/IT career began in 1981 with 15 years at Motorola. Along about 8 years in, I started doing tower work as a side gig and eventually went on to own a tower service. This story is just nuts and very fishy. No trace? More like no way! The first time I climbed a AM tower was pretty sketchy, I didn't want to become a crispy critter (like the frog). Good story! and I really enjoy your tower and station videos!
How about a video on Mt. Pisgah North Carolina? It is probably the most unique site I've been to (and I've been to hundreds). It site is only accessibly by foot or by a flat rail car winched up (that is how we took equipment up). Look into it. Very interesting place.
I live close enough to Pisgah. What services are there?
someone monitor the local swap shops and see if someone calls wanted to sell a radio tower or trade it for something
Bust out the oversize magnifying glasses and tweed, Geerling family investigative road trip!
what if it wasnt actually stolen, but "selectively destroyed" I've seen similar things in realestate to get around demo permits. Wouldn't be surprised if someone this allows the station to get around am permit requirement? No idea how that works though.
Was there someone who wanted the land? Perhaps for a housing development?
very possible, it genuinely couldve been that, but im guessing it's pretty unlikely, judging by the fact that they put up a kickstarter lol. @@russellhltn1396
@@russellhltn1396 There's certainly some good opportunities. That's a lot of land between the MARJAC chicken factory and the I-22 freeway to the south, outside the city limits. It's probably Federally protected swamp land. Worth checking out.
I could be wrong but the tower looks like Rohn 50g . I think if you cut the guides on one side let her fall and cut it up with a demolition saw you could have the job done in around 6 hours. I think it would require a skid loader or similar machine and a flatbed. Feed line appears to be 1 inch Hardline or heliax. A Demolition saw would cut through that like butter.
Yeah, it's the part about doing all of that "without a trace" that seems unbelievable.
News article said they left behind guidewires so wasn't truly Without a Trace
@@terrym3543 yeah, I'm thinking "without a trace" means they have no clue where it went. There's certainly evidence left at the site.
Do you mean Rohn 55G? Rohn hasn't manufactured a 50G. Also it's really hard to distinguish 45G from 55G unless you get up close and measure the slight difference in leg tube diameter (1.25" vs 1.5"), or close enough to see if the section joint bolts are 2 different sizes (45G) or both the same size (55G).
@@terrym3543 The news article conveniently left out the part where the guy wires are laying on the ground underneath a year's worth of weed growth.
Too many insidious stories about this AM site. Sounds to me to be an inside job. The transmitter site was uninsured, the maintenance was sketchy, the owner obviously didn't care if the AM outlet lived or died. A little sleuthing around the owner's finances will unearth the unsavory reasons for this "mystery".
Do you insure a completely depreciated 70 year old tower and a probably 30 year old transmitter? No, you self insure. Do you notice the AM transmitter is not on when you don't transmit from midnight to 8:00am? No. I'm sure all sorts of forensic accountants will be digging into this situation. I think a little sleuthing would uncover the true motive. 1) meth addicted metal thieves 2) tower thieves 3) a conspiracy to eliminate the unprofitable AM side of the business 4) a conspiracy to sell a valuable plot of land on the south side of the city 5) a conspiracy to convert an AM tower site to a cell site. or more conspiracies I haven't thought of.
Thanks for adding actual captions for the Deaf
I heard about this this morning. Definitely needs follow-up and very sus to ask for funding before we know the whole story. I also don't see how they wouldn't have a monitor alarm system. I wonder if it was off the air for other reasons before it got taken.
They are off the air at night between midnight and 8:00am. I checked their operating schedule.
I've worked in radio since I was 15 years old. I'm now 61. This is the most bizarre thing I've ever heard of. The station (obviously) goes off the air and no one notices. The tower is apparently cut down, taken apart and hauled off and no one notices. And the most stupid part is that the lawn care guys are the ones who discovered it. The stations I owned has a remote control system that would call my cell phone day or night or whenever there was a problem. This thing stinks to high heaven. Sorry, but someone at the station knows something... at the least, where that tower got hauled off to.
Ha, no kidding. As if the mowing crew would care lol.
@@p911sc7 Perhaps the mowing crew were sent on the assumption that they would notice the tower was gone, tell the owner, and then the owner had an excuse to call the police and report the tower and transmitter "stolen." And then play the victim and start a GoFundMe.
@@CrankyBeach Yep. Hopefully the FCC will get interested in pursuing what appears to be several years of willful violation of their FM rebroadcast authorization - and possibly faking of their AM transmitter logs as well.
As a radio ham, i have assisted in putting up and taking down a 50 foor lattice tower, using a gin pole ad vehicle, we left no trace (this was for ham field days)
I can't imagine doing the same with a 400 foot tower that's much heavier duty, it would need a big truck or powerful winch to do it the same way
Then there's all the bolts to undo if you don't use cutting tools.
yeah, only a 200 ft tower so piece of cake!
Did you use a jin pole?
@@WA4OSH I was the ground man because I haven't done any second story work since I got out of the fire department 30+ years ago. 85 feet up in a bucket was enough for me.
@@WA4OSH Yes, i said it in my comment ;)
@@sparkyprojects So true. Sorry I missed it.
The incident sounds totally fishy to me, especially with a nearby processing plant so close to the site and nobody noticing a tower collapsing.
1) The workers inside of the MarJac chicken plant are inside a big building and hear fans and probably the noise from a big freezer.
2) A collapsing tower may sound like a thunder clap. Even if they heard something, it was ignored.
3) Did the tower collapse, or was it dismantled section by section?
@@WA4OSH between the chicken processing plant and the sewage plant, it would not have been unusual to see various trucks coming and going at all hours or to hear loud noises. Plus, and let’s be honest here, most of the chicken processing workers don’t speak English and the cops don’t speak Spanish, so we’ve got a failure to communicate. (I wonder if the processing plant needed land to expand operations? Hmmm)
@@kirkgarner7381 What's on 1710 AM in that area? I hear oldies 24x7 on a Web SDR in Birmingham, AL. Yes most people working at the chicken plant or sewage treatment plant are not going to ask a lot of questions regarding some workers pulling a transmitter tower/antenna down.
We had a translator for our TV station out of Salt Lake City in Rock Springs Wyoming. Our RF guy went to find out why we weren't on the air. Turned out the entire site had been removed. No one in town knew anything about whereour transmitter and antennas might be.
I recently watched some footage of the property we're the tower "was" one week before recorded by William Collier. It was clear that the transmission building had been out of service for a very long time. Weeds had grown inside the fence and the power meter was clearly decayed and wires that had been cut were corroded not freshy cut. That radio station also didn't have insurance on the tower which is very fishy. It appears that the radio station was in debt and had failed to maintain the AM tower that they were required to keep in operation. So instead of asking for money to maintain it they decided to claim it was stolen and play the victim to get money from their go fund me page.
When no one is listening to the station. Nobody is going to call. Working at a radio station studio as a subcontractor. The DJ announced they have 4 tickets to local concerts. Listeners have to be the 3rd caller. The phone never did ring.
oof!
For any that may care about such things... The tallest tower in the USA and the world at 2063 feet is no more having been lowered by some 75 feet. KTHI/KXTV/KOVR TV Tower at Blanchard, North Dakota has been lowered to a miniscule 1987 feet.
From one that signed the registry kept in the base of the lightening burned beacon lamp long about the later 1980's. ;) As an additional historic foot note that Kline Metal tower was raised in the later 1960's in just over 30 days in the month of November by 11 insanely-brave men that would ride the guy'lines to the ground each day rather than spend the time/effort to crawl down the tower before retiring to "Beer-O-Clock"! It was a assuredly different time in our history!!!
KXTV/KOVR tower is outside Sacramento, California
I think there was a taller tower in either Montana or North Dakota that fell due to ice loading a couple of decades ago. No idea if it was ever replaced.
Somebody cut down a 500 ft Tower here in Oklahoma last month to steal the copper off of it! They said it was a half million dollars.
In Oregon, scrap metal recyclers are required to keep records of anyone recycling non ferrous metal in case of reported theft. Takes 3 business days to get your check from the local recycler.
If they were after the antenna/tower for its scrap value, they would have just pulled the whole antenna. It looks like they dismantled it section by section. To me, this means the thieves needed it for re-use, not scrap.
ua-cam.com/video/DgRyXKZ9xZ0/v-deo.html
For AM radio the tower is the antenna, and its made of steel (ferrous metal), and not worth much on the scrap metal market. They might get like two or three hundred dollars for the whole thing.@@WA4OSH
Shows how popular the station is that no one rang up to let them know the TX was off air.
Nobody listens to little class D AMs if the have a translator. Everyone is listening to the FM translator. I'm not at all surprised that a member of the general public didn't call. But every station that I take care of has a telemetry alarm that calls or sends you an email when the base current or transmitter output power goes to zero. Odd that they bothered to send a crew to clear the weeds, but didn't properly monitor the station.
What I don’t understand is why the scrap metal company wouldn’t be asking questions and shedding light on receiving this metal similar to pawn shops and their rules. I guess they are all rogues and louts and don’t report anything or question anything. It’s all about the almighty buck$$. Unbelievable!
Scrap steel isn't regulated like copper and platinum (catalytic converters)
Scrap dealers don't ask a lot of questions. They don't even ask questions when catalytic converter thieves come in selling a truck load full. They don't ask questions when spools of wire stolen from homes under construction are sold for scrap. Old steel towers ... nice and easy to move with the same magnet used to crush cars. No questions.
The most curious part of this video has been the few people who read the title, don't watch the video and then react to it angrily without exercising their common sense.
The AM tower fell down or was dismantled (per Google Street View) 6 months ago. The owner didn't tell anybody because he didn't want to have to replace it - his license was for the 1kw AM station only and his FM and Internet feed would be forced off the air if the FCC found out. When the FCC found out last month, he suddenly declared the tower to have been burgled by unknown melanistic crackheads, presumably working in cahoots with mafia junk dealers. "Without a trace! Donate money!"
I remember working on some local electronic equipment and a circuit fault tripped the breaker to the outlet that the device under test was plugged into. Normally, not a biggie, fix the fault, reset the breaker, reapply power and move on.
Turned out that the transmitter was powered by that same breaker, as the college radio station was in an ancient building. The chief engineer noticed dead air and had come to the room to investigate and related that with 30 seconds of dead air, studies showed a 90% loss of audience. No telephone calls to the station, no calls to police, no rockets red glare, just a change of the dial to a transmitting station.
Dead air time, around one minute. He chuckled, as it was unavoidable and I was unaware of the transmitter not being hard wired to an independent breaker (again, old building and well, no money).
For this place, they filed for an STA (special temporary authority) for dead air (otherwise after a year of dead air, their license is forfeited anyway and there are a few other regulations I've not tracked over the decades since I had a 3rd class license). Repeatedly. Doesn't look good, but small operations and some oddball emergencies like wildfires, floods, etc have impacted the same areas repeatedly, so doesn't necessarily meet the kiss of death, the FCC evaluates the request and either grants it or denies it. It's not as if, stop transmitting and we'll open fire with the machine gun nuke launcher.
Hell, while in the Middle East, our technical control facility (big time communications node for the DoD for that region, most bases have their own, but ours was a theater wide facility) went down, dropped satellite links, fiber links, no network, no phones, tons of virtual ink pens gave their lives in service to an angry General whose phone and e-mail stopped working.
Cause: Power issues. Failed main base generator #X dropped power, which broke crypto, took 8 hours to reset all crypto. Failed building UPS on a power distribution transformer failure (several of which supplied the building). Another transformer failure, building UPS still offline due to all of the batteries in the battery room being defunct (mentioned in the weekly IA meeting by yours truly after the first outage made me aware of the issue). Yet another transformer failure, UPS ran with its room full of brand new batteries, alas, they died and one primary emergency generator failed due to undetected flood damage (yes, a flood in a desert - ruptured 1" pipe poured water underground, which entered the diesel fuel tank for the generator, displacing the fuel (whoinhell plans for a flood in a desert where 1" of rain per year is normal?! (we did afterward))).
All required the military side of communications STA authorizations.
Then, a ship dragged an anchor across the main fiber ring around the Persian Gulf. Suffice it to say, multiple nations naval forces had some words to say with the vessel's master, chief among them, "You are under arrest". The area was well marked on maps and with buoys. They got that fixed, then a main fiber to Europe got dragged the same way off of Egypt, similar events ensued. 5 years of never boring or cold... Actually, kind of miss Qatar!
What saved our butts was 7+ years of uninterrupted service, declining budgets causing many of the causes of the outages and rapid recovery. Still doomed the base, which originally was a prepositioned stock storage base anyway.
Oh, entertaining is getting a message to request the STA and report the outage when the networks, telephone and IP based aren't working. Fortunately, we did have some independent and nearly forgotten capability there.
If the DoD, with more money to spend than the Almighty can have those problems and have them accepted, mom and pop stations certainly have a good chance of doing so. Otherwise, AM would be ghostly silent nationwide.
I believe this is a widespread issue that once radio stations get their FM translator, they tear down the tower themselves and don’t tell anybody
I hope ownership didn't have anything to do with it, but I smell something fishy in Denmark. The station is apparently owned by a very elderly gentleman, maybe he thought they wouldn't go after an old man if the truth came out. I bet nobody noticed the tower was gone because the AM was either non operational or barely operational and an afterthought to the FM translator, which was virtually forgotten. But they realized; hey our tower is old and rusty and our transmitter is shot, lets make it disappear and see if we can get GoFundMe to pay for a new tower and transmitter. My guess is there is more here than meets the eye. I imagine the FBI or the US Marshalls will get to the bottom of it.
1st of all the ad on Craigslist said FREE Tower, come & get it. 2nd of all it was only 10, 20 foot stackable sections that took less than 3 hours to take down and load on the trailer. Hey, if they really want it back, I will gladly drop that junk off somewhere and they can put it back up themselves. 🤣
That's one way to justify no longer transmitting
I don't know if you are being sarcastic or not. It's an interesting conspiracy theory to get out of the AM broadcast business, get an excellent cell site location that covers hundreds if not thousands of workers in the industrial side of town (no Karens to object to a new tower)... Only if the FCC would allow their translator to become an FM only operation.
There are some very hard questions going to be asked about this! I remember up in Detroit many years ago, I was helping a roofer put a new roof on my house. He had a heavy duty 30 foot roofing ladder leaning on the back on the house. I went in the house for a few minutes. I heard the roofer yell to me about where I put his ladder?? Someone, while the roofer was about 10 feet away with his back turned, managed to take the ladder down, move through 80 feet of back yard, over a 5 foot fence then a 8 foot fence and disappear without making a sound within a couple minutes!
"sorry officer, cant say ive seen the missing 200 foot radio tower around here"
my suspiciously 200 foot radio tower shaped throat:
sounds like insurance fraud to me
They had no insurance.
They had no insurance. Why would you insure a fully depreciated tower and transmitter? Sure. You would want insurance to cover job related insuries, but not replacement of old gear. The insurance costs may have been astronomical to cover for stupid things like
Eg. If the tower collapsed and killed a tweaking scrap metal thief or Eg. If a tower thief fell off the tower while dismantling it. Eg. if a transmitter thief injured his back stealing the boat anchor. I hate to wish Darwin nominations on anyone, but...
You have to have insurance for there to be insurance fraud
Owner stated, no insurance on the tower or equipment. Which is a little strange, these things take lightning and weather damage at lot.
Without a trace = Insurance scam.
They had no insurance.
@@loycepetrey9406they said they have none.
Former Chief Engineer here. I had a daytimer AM (250 watt with 13 watt PSA) I took care of may years ago. The transmitter was in the now abandoned studio building, with about 400' of 7/8" foam dielectric coax running out to the ATU. The coax was on metals poles about 10' in the air. One morning I get a page from the AM morning guy that the transmitter readings looked "funky" and he was having trouble hearing the station (the studios were about 7 miles from the transmitter site). I head to the transmitter site and confirmed that the readings did indeed look funky, and that there was no indication of base current. I start walking out to the tower, figuring something fried in the ATU. Then I realized that the coax was gone. There were tire tracks in the fiend, and I figured someone tied a rope around the coax and pulled it off with a truck.
I wound up going to Radio Shack (this is 1985...they still sold something besides satellite dishes and cell phones). I bought a full roll of CB radio coax (big stuff, rated for 1kW), and got the station back on the air with that.
I notified the police, and they wound up finding the coax behind an apartment complex about a mile from the station. Apparently the thieves discovered just what a pain it is to get the copper out of the jacket and foam.
My local AM has a "superadio" in the studio, running continuously at low volume. The know rather quickly if the transmitter has gone out. The transmitter is a lot older than me, and of course vulnerable to lightning strikes.
They are of the air from 12:00 midnight and 8:00 am. There may not have been anyone there to hear the transmitter go dead.
I doubt this happened within an eight-hour span. Anything is possible I suppose. The steel can't have brought that much in scrap value.
@@stevejohnson1321 It's probably easier to bring an abandoned car in for scrap steel than it is to fell an antenna tower.
never underestimate tweakers and metal thieves.
Tweakers and metal thieves operate with brute force and ignorance.
I'm going to give everyone a little clue here. They're a satellite data that is available to the general public that can show when those tower actually disappeared. It's available online if you decide to pay for it 😊
The senior year of my compSci degree involved a project about handling large data sets, it just happened to essentially translate to "rebuild Google Earth".
I got so close to buying some of these high res commercial satellite data sets just to make the project look less crappy. Ended up sticking with the free EU generated ones that had like 1-3m resolution once we figured out we were too dumb to handle bigger data sets gracefully in the program.
I did however get some small sample sets to work with for free and they were of a beautiful resolution.
I worked for a major telco and was sent to repair a T1 at a COW (cellular on wheels) site late one night that had been used for a golf match. These are mobile cell towers that are moved by 18 wheelers. I could not find the tower so I went to the security desk of the resort and the security officer there made a HUGE deal that the telco had sent an absolute moron (me) out to fix something when I was so dumb I could not even find a massive tower on a massive trailer, and even got his boss and the resort general manager to come to the office. When he made a big show of opening his office door leading outside there was nothing there. Somebody had removed the tower earlier and he had not even noticed. There were profuse apologies and I did not stop laughing for a week!
This doesn't pass the sniff test for me either.
I thought it was a requirement to keep transmitter logs, daily if I remember right.
No status monitoring of any kind?
No alarm system of any kind?
No trace? C'mon. There must be tire tracks, trampled grass, shards or scraps of fresh cut metal showing the presence of lack of rust, something.
Easy enough to tell when it lost power. Pull records from the power company.
Maybe an hour north of me, I loled when i heard
"Without a Trace" is standard News Hype by a reporter that didn't even visit the site
True! Though I pulled that bit directly off the station's home page... but it does look like they pasted that from another news article.
This is the Craziest Story I think most of us have ever heard in regards to a Theft. 🤔
The WJLX General Manager agrees with you
ua-cam.com/video/DgRyXKZ9xZ0/v-deo.html
Requiring an AM station to broadcast FM is not something I've heard before in Europe. Seems to be an US-only thing.
In Brazil it’s very common to have the electric wires stolen. Once I had my Sky TV antenna stolen. Then, I had to replace it and added a chain with padlocks IN A FREAKING TV ANTENNA !!!
the amount of copper there is in a TV cable is miniscule compared to the cost of the thing
Skytv. Nobody cares.
@@ScottWinterringer it was almost 2 decades ago...
I hate it when space aliens (have to specify that these days) steal radio towers... LOL
The most likely scenario is that the owners were in on the removal. Aging and failing equipment, likely insufficient revenue, no insurance... but it's conveniently come up missing, including the transmitter. If it were just the tower, it'd be more believable that it were scrappers, but then how do you manage to unload that much metal when such a feat is sure to gain media attention. Someone resourceful enough to pull off that kind of heist reportedly 'without a trace' would almost certainly be good enough at planning to be able to foresee problems. So yeah, my best guess is it was planned by the owners either as a fraud in the worse case, or an ill advised marketing stunt in the best case.
I bought a 3000 watt AM/SSB tube transmitter for $26 at an auction. It cost 20x more to get it home.
If they didn't realize that their equipment was missing and they were off the air for some time, the commission should pull their license. None of the damage looks recent to me, and they have a reputation for being shady operators.
That's an interesting question. I'm sure the FCC will figure out when the power was cut to the transmitter shack from the utility. They are usually right on top of industrial power monitoring. Then when was the next scheduled time to be on the air again? They did not operate from midnight to 8:00am.
We've not heard the rest of this fish story I'm sure....
Maybe he was coming up due for an FCC site visit, so he had the brush hog crew go out to cut the weeds and "discover" the tower "stolen", to avoid the trouble he would be in if they discovered he'd been operating FM only for years.
This is the most wholesome and awesome channel I can imagine. Love it!
I wonder if the adjacent business would have CCTV which covers the access roads either in the immediate area or the main roads? I do have to say this whole story is very suspicious.
From the overhead photo that area looks to be pretty rural, low density and even fewer security cameras of any sort.
I think Carmen Santiago was involved.
It is a requirement of the licensee to monitor your signal 24/7/365 or face fines and loss of license.
That, and the fact that it would take a great number of knowledgeable individuals to get it down, disassembled and trucked away. And thats just the tower.
They can pick up a used transmitter on Facebook marketplace, there is even a new local listing.
I'm not saying insurance job but insurance job
🌩️ Were there any lightning reports in the area recently? 🤔😉😅
They didn't have insurance though - they're e-begging on gofundme now
@@gorak9000 they can do both
@@crazycomet8635 I'm pretty sure step 1 of insurance fraud is you actually have to have insurance. Pretty tough to pull that off if you don't have a policy...
Where in the world is Carman Sandiego
Maybe the cartels needed towers for their clandestine radio network? Lots of conspiracy theories that need some real sleuthing.
Great views on the sand and waters,one of the great views on this earth. Fantastic for you to be a part of it and to share.
😂 We were just laughing about this, this morning! 😎✌️
Stray Phaser fire incident from a landing party?
I could understand them not noticing the station was off the air if WJLX-AM was a daytime-only station.
Their broadcast day, according to their schedule, is daytime and evening. They are off the air from midnight to 8:00AM.
@@WA4OSH - Well that makes more sense but how would the thieves drop a 200 foot tower, chop it up, load the pieces into multiple trucks and then steal the transmitter all in one night without being noticed?
@@JohnCline I think you could stack 10 20 ft sections into a 53ft container along with the transmitter, antenna tuner and a rack full of telememetry equipment. I'm not sure how the tower sections were bolted together... I don't even know what kind of tower material they had .. Rohn 50G?
@@JohnCline read the post by @TerrisLeonis says he's seen a video of the site. It paints a completely different picture of what's really going on.
I'm wondering if this isn't actually what it's being presented to us to be...
Was that wrong? Should I not have dont that? 🤔
Yer gonna git in truuuuuble!
WOW
Very sus... how is there so little evidence? How did they not know? The skeptical nature of the posts is entirely reasonable in this case.
Add the fund raising... fishy.
Put yourself in their place. Someone steals your uninsured tower and transmitter. What do you do? I think I would try to salvage my business and try to avoid bankruptcy. A GoFundMe fundraiser? It's better than giving up and heading to the homeless shelter and food bank.
@@WA4OSH They didn't have insurance?
Well... okay. I strike that last sentence from my post, then.
@@gannas42 I donated to their GoFundMe. They were probably pretty cash strapped before this happened. It's like looting your own corner store and then trying to make ends meet with a bake sale. Yes WOW.
According to a few local sources, that station had been illegally (without an STA) off air for a few years. The tower fell a couple of years ago due to years of no maintenance. Locals cut it up and took it away back then.
However when the FCC began sniffing about recently the plot was hatched that the tower would be suddenly 'stolen'.
Yeah my first thought was in high school we had a radio station and every hour we had to call the transmitter up by phone (this was in the 90s) and it would read stats back we'd record in an engineering logbook. There really shouldn't have been an easy way for someone to walk off with the transmitter never mind the entire tower.
This sound like an unproduced sequel to “Kelly’s Heroes”…
🤣 Who would be in your cast?!? 🤔
Donald Sutherland reprising his role as “Oddball” working as a beatnik radio personality in the mid 1970’s?
He was ahead of his time in the original! 😉 How about current (living, working) actors for the remake? 🤔
We’re gonna want an AM station infrastructure when a major catastrophe hits.
Gonna be honest, I see no reason to have AM even in disaster situations.
I have a hand crank powered AM/FM radio. Should the SHTF are there any real journalists left that know how to report the facts? The disaster is likely to be a power outage.
I heard from my dad who works in radio that this tower was not stolen by some scrapers overnight or anything and that the station owner has not been using the site properly violating FCC rules and all sorts of things. Hopefully those that donated to the go fund me can cancel or something.
Unfortunately that's the downside to GoFundMe, people often collect 'donations' with little to no accountability, and it's mostly down to how well someone can sell their story for the donations.
@@GeerlingEngineering I have inside information. I don't know if I can say it all but a certain large communications company is going to help out for a year. Not really to help out the tower owner but to get the station back on air for the town.
We (cell carrier) arrived on site to find thieves had cut one guy wire, causing the top section of the tower to collapse to the ground. Then stole all the coax off the tower. We have also had someone climb the tower and steal the cables from top to bottom.