The station with the missing tower
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"It was discovered by a landscaping crew." Um... no air monitors? No off-air alarms? BULL. They took it down themselves. Every station I've worked at had silence sensors and carrier detectors. IIRC 10 seconds of silence set off alarms in-studio, 30 seconds and engineers were paged.
I'd be willing to accept it was knocked out by a storm, even that the debris was actually stolen and not by insiders, but yeah, there's no way he didn't know about this long ago. Too many oddities at the site to believe this tower was transmitting or even on site for weeks at a bare minimum.
If the manager thinks he's telling the truth(lol), he's admitting to being wildly incompetent and the owner should fire him immediately on those grounds.
Don't forget: No monitor. No insurance. No alarm system.
And possibly that their FM feed was also not done right, as it shouln't have been allowed to work when the AM is down.
Who was doing the required meter readings? Are their AM transmitter logs full of fake readings? The Google street maps showed a tower standing in October 2022 and no tower in March 2023. Oops. Now they're allegedly begging for money via GoFundMe. Time to inspect their public files.
@@thephantom1492 This did it on purpose.
The district attorney could subpoena the electric company and find out when the meter was pulled.
And possibly the actual power consumption / every meter readout too.
There should be a somewhat constant power usage until when it went off air.
Maybe the theif stole the meter. Maybe there was also a screw up at the power compagny. If they can not read the meter, they will estimate the usage and bill for that estimated use. Once they can read it again then they adjust your invoice to the true consumption by adding the fee or giving you credit if you over paid. So the bill itself may not show the truth.
Won't happen DA will not even touch the case
Check for permits. I know this happened in Alabama but I am sure a permit was needed to tear down the tower. Or did the station pay someone in CASH to destroy the tower? Sounds like FRAUD.
@@MrBadjohn69 You can drop that tower with a cutting torch in like 1/2 hour, if you used small bottles you could even carry them in the trunk of a car. Probably let it lay on the ground for a couple days and when no one noticed, he gave it to scrappers to cut up
@@joecummings1260 You just said that a seres of crimes were committed. No permit was filed to remove the tower. Conspiracy to commit fraud. Filing a false police report. And more.
FCC regulations were violated, possibly going back more than a decade. See DOJ for more information.
And since the tower was an OLD TOWER it was likely solid and not hollow tubing. As such the frame would have serious weight and leave an impression on the ground if it fell. There is no evidence it was toppled.
No someone "removed" the tower that had access to a crane OR it was dismantled piece by piece and lowered to the ground. Note the wheel tracks....made by a very heavy vehicle.
The question is does Alabam want to prosecute the many felonies in this situation or does Alabama treat it like it does with moonshiners?
The whole thing screams shady, shady, shady.
I'm an expert on abandon structures and no one has been home here for years. It's a go fund me scam and shame on WJLX ,he needs to do some jail time.
It's been reported to gofundme and apparently gofundme doesn't care
@@adamdnewman The scam hasn't been proven yet. But they might have flagged the payout to be delayed until it is proven to be true or false.
@@thephantom1492 Sadly GoFundMe flat out ignores most reports.
Just curious, when you say you're an expert on abandoned structures, what does that mean?
I hate people who use go fraud me to scam people
A station that should have pulled the plug on their operation years ago, but when they got the FM Translator they switched to Low Power FM mode and shut down the AM in violation of FCC Rules.
Yep, they are basically an unlicensed transmitter.
Yep, and maybe once realizing they may get caught not having the AM transmitting as well they "stole" the tower to have an excuse.
The fact only the FM frequency is advertised on his shirt tells you everything you need to know.
the news is helping them claiming it's made of copper when it's made of steel
As a radio engineer in the UK I can think of just a few cases of towers of towers being felled by vandalism. However on hearing about this incident I did have a snoop around the internet. The AM transmitter has a long history and was allegedly intermittent in 2016/17. I did have a brief search to see if a Gates transmitter had appeared for sale at about that time... Most people with a passion for radio would not weigh in a small transmitter for scrap metal value, I suspect it was sold. Certainly the site visit video indicated that the tower had been gone a while. I suspect the popular belief is correct, that the AM only existed on paper to justify the FM operation.
The information I read was that the transmitter was an old 90's era Harris transmitter.
@@williamjones4483 I heard it was a Gates, but I don't remember the source...
If it was an original Gates, that's pretty old and hard to keep on air with parts availability only from other 'retired' parts transmitters. Even a Harris from the 90s probably also has limited parts on shelf, if the new GatesAir even has them or hadn't already done a end of life support by the mid to late 2000's. I know on the TV transmitter side towards the end of the analog era parts, were only what was available on shelf from Harris, down to the single digits on several items. No one made them anymore. Most broadcast engineers don't want to touch those old transmitters or get into it because it's next to impossible to find parts and substitution is a liability; what if the damn thing starts a fire because of some part you put in, or ancient new old stock you somehow found? Owners going to blame you for taking them off the air and destroying their hopeless transmitter, nope. Plus most of the engineers who worked on these transmitters have long since retired. Just bite the bullet and get yourself a nice 1kW rack mount AM transmitter that will be maintenance free for years and use way less power. If the guys making money with his FM translator it's well worth the investment of your most critical infrastructure that's tied to your license.
@@marcusdamberger My thinking is that they were no longer able to afford keeping the A.M. portion on the air and possibly sold the tower for whatever they could get. I also imagine that the owner or general manager thought they could get by with operating the F.M. translator only which is quite illegal. It is also quite illegal to take a station off the air permanently without permission of the FCC. At any rate, there is something quite fishy here.
Thanks for speaking in a more educated manner on this. I don't know anything about radio, as evident by my the mistakes in my video lol, but I wanted to be a starting point for others to talk about this more in depth and you've done just that!
Having that on the ground confirmation was huge. That raw walk around helped give context and video evidence that the tower has been missing for a long time. Thank you for posting your video!
Your video broke the case, my friend. Great freaking job! With it appearing that the AM station has been off the air for 11 years, it really doesn't look good for the station. You deserve a lot of credit for doing the legwork and essentially showing that what they're claiming was running until Feb 2024 isn't true.
@J.C... All I did was compile sources. The others mentioned in the video did the legwork. But it does not look good for that station.
Geerling Engineering stole it. They made the first non legacy media video on it hahahahahah
Seeing the site, it is overgrown over the guide wires at least a year more likely 3 years or more.
The building is completely empty
But the absolute most damning thing is there hasn't been electric service to this site in years and the meter has been gone for years and the service wires were cut years ago and you can see the rust and corrosion where it was cut probably 5 or 6 years ago
The FBI is going to pull the records from the power company and find out the last time there was an electric bill out there and what day they pulled that meter and this guy is going to go to jail.
Now if they had actually taken the tower down this year there would be imprints and tire tracks in the ground and there are none
I would bet they shut down this Tower and took out the am transmitter and any other equipment and the site has set empty for years and I still don't know how the tower would have been recently stolen because it would have left marks and there aren't any
So if somebody actually stole the tower it was years ago
this scam is being run by a bunch of AM stations that promote themselves as FM stations and there's been 10 of these at least in the news in the past 3 months
These AM stations don't want to deal with the hassle of running an AM station they want the FM translator and they can't have the FM without the AM
Reeks of the radio station pulling down the AM transmitter and tower to save money as the AM transmitter was a cost center, while keeping the revenue center, the FM transmitter, on the air. Substantially reduced the operating cost.
How to say your station has no listeners without saying your station has no listeners
More likely they are almost only FM only, and the AM tower and transmitter were long abandoned, and long ago were stolen. You can see the marks where it was dropped down, and with the depressions where it impacted as the sections were dropped down next to tower, and they have had a good number of freeze thaw cycles. they were skirting the FCC, using that old AM license with the majority of listeners, around 99.99%, being FM only, and the AM side had long been off, and abandoned. You can also see the interior of the transmitter hut had been vandalised a long time before, and also it has no disturbance of the dust on the floors.
It is beyond obvious that the transmitter site has not been in use for almost a decade.
Definitely has been abandoned for quite some time.
Missing towers? I'm missing a set of keys for the mountain...
Bravo. Excellent report. It would be awesome if there were a few full MW spectrum scans from nearby SDR's available for analysis.
Indeed. Problem is that would be hearsay. Unless the FCC was listening…
@@TheBroadcastEngineerhearsay evidence is admissable in court.
Yep! nailed it! I respect how you tackled this subject sir! much respect! I'm definitely curious about what is really going on with that station, I'll definitely admit that it looks really shady as far as what happened
I was an engineer for the US Navy and part of my duties was the oversight of contractors operating and maintaining facilities like this. I did this for over 20 years. There is no way this story is true as told.
Interesting, yes, over 11 years since that site was on the air. I really can't wait for the FBI to go to the power company and get the meter number from the site and the ACTUAL bills for that meter and history of the meter install and removal.
I really doubt the FBI will get involved.
@@TheBroadcastEngineer Very true. It's much more likely that the FCC would be the one making the request. Depending on their own findings, they'd also be the ones to refer the case to DOJ for further investigation.
Nothing will happen because the FBI and FCC don't give a F
I was waiting for your take on this Marcos. My local FM rock station was talking about this and they relayed that their engineer couldn't believe it for a second. CHTZ-FM has a notorious issue where if there is a song that is faded to the left for a few seconds, it triggers the silence alarm and thus the backup playlist, dubbed the Nirvana ghost, where "About a girl- Unplugged" begins to play- since its at the top of their playlist alphabetically. He fixed the stupid problem since he was sick of getting constant (3/4 times daily) notifications about it.
Question for you, Marcos. Could a court/FCC/ governing bodies or authorities subpoena any system records or notifications that could potentiality alarm a station/engineer of any "off-air" or malfunction alerts? I wonder if that could potentially be a nail in the coffin if they had ample time and knowledge of the station being off air while not authorized to be.
The FCC could ask for power bills for the location. They could ask for station logs. This could be really big trouble for someone. If there are station logs that say the transmitters been working within licensed parameters and the power bills show that the power was significantly less or cancelled, that would be a dishonesty issue.
But like you said, where was the silence alarms? Where was the engineer? Maybe the engineering was contracted, but even then… you have to have a remote control. Did that alarm?
There would have to be some really extenuating circumstances for this to blow over.
@@TheBroadcastEngineer That power bill he is showing could be for the other site, and the power company might have actual records of that site being off for a long time due to a missing meter, which would be quite an interesting thing. Going to guess that the AM side was not actually drawing power for at least a decade, and had been left with zero maintenance, other than being pencil whipped as needed.
I mentioned this in another video but seeing the box fan being used for ventilation shows the budget to keep the AM site on air was virtually zero. There is no way that site was transmitting a few short weeks ago. A second generation GM should have been aware of the moment that it stopped transmitting, not relying on a landscaping company as a station monitor. I'm thinking the tower fell down due to lack of maintenance a significant amount of time ago (and this is what damaged the fence around the tower). The AM frequency featuring anywhere on the most recent station logo smells off as well. If you are paying money to keep your AM transmitter on air, you sure as heck tell people about it!
The truth will come out I'm sure.
observations from other videos:
Electrical service is missing from the pole (50 feet away) all the way to the meter.
Building had had the copper wiring stripped, and that wasn't recently by the looks of things.
Brush around the building has had time to grow, and that is WAY more than a few days worth.
Door hanging from the hinges is wind damage, and if you look close the padlock is still clicked shut. IOW, no sign of forced entry. (someone had a key) The other part of the lock hasp is still on the door.
Brush in front of the door is 2 feet high and basically not disturbed, so removal of gear didn't happen a few days ago.
The video of the guy trying to listen in his car is from 2012, so at least intermittently off the air for over a decade.
Dirt on the floor of the building has no recent foot traffic.
Driveway to that site has no signs of recent traffic from removing the tower.
No obvious signs of where the tower fell so that means the weeds have had time to grow in the field as well.
The local meth heads would know how long the site has been vacant
HAHAHA right?!
In the summer of 1979, I worked for a broadcast radio engineer for an FM station. During that time, some idiot went out to the transmitter site and shot holes through the transmitter building and the heliax. Missed the transmitter and the heliax was functional until one morning when the heavy dew settled inside the heliax. The transmitter was off during midnight until around 6 so there weren't issues until the transmitter was lit. Instantly, the station studio's received feedback there were problems and the broadcaster called the radio engineer.
That was 1979. We didn't need landscapers telling us that there were issues. Even though no one was on site, we knew there were problems right away. That was 45 years ago. What is it now that they don't have the technology we had 45 years ago? How did the station engineer not know? I don't understand that one bit? They have to know. No one addresses this. You don't need a landscaper to tell you.
I agree. My guess is that they don’t have an on staff engineer. They contract it out as needed. Maybe they didn’t pay the last contractor and he stopped answering the phone. Don’t know. Just speculation. But some broadcasters like to stiff the technical people and think that it won’t come back and bite them in the sensitive area.
Low budget station.
This whole story is crazy. I truly wonder what the FCC will do.
Nothing as usual.
@@DJ-Drakken the FCC is to encumbered by its self to do anything
The FCC will do nothing at all
Massive fines and also he's on the hook for multiple wire fraud, filing a false police report, tax fraud, etc.
LOL. First off, what is a lanscaping crew doing in the winter?
“Hey, this is station, we need you to go and trim up some of the vegetation that’s grown up around our station. You guys available?”
“Sure! No problem. We talking March or something?”
“No, can you get out there today?”
“Today? Sure, I guess.”
“Thanks, let me know if there’s any problems or strange things when you get there.”
“…ok…”
Three hours later…
“Hey this is the landscaping crew… you said the tower site, right? I’m not seeing the tower.”
“What? No, how could it be?! 😱”
Ok that’s how it plays out in my head… probably nowhere near accurate.
HomebrewStew, it is in the sunbelt.
That's good. 😂 Another thing I find interesting is Jasper has a poplulation of 14,000. People are naturally drawn to looking at high structures yet no one noticed a missing tower? This is almost as good as the candidates. @@TheBroadcastEngineer
I know of a station in Paducah that had an equipment fire at the base of their tower. The building was leveled. It didn't take but a few days to get back on the air...hmmm.
@@TheBroadcastEngineer Maybe he thought a third party "discovering" the problem would make it more believable that he didn't know about it?
THE TOWER! THE TOWER! Rapunzel! Rapunzel! We are going to the tower !!!
GREAT Job Collier
I've DXed some AM stations that no longer list their AM freq to the point you think you are listening to an FM station
Great presentation, avoided wild conspiracy theories, and kind of presented the facts, and allowed us to draw our own conclusions.
the Collier site visit never showed how the power got underground from a pole? i wonder if the pole was sniped also.
Not sure.
It's believed the power cable was strung from the pole with the transformer to the building. You can see where the wiring is "cut" at the meter.
I think it was fed power overhead. In the MonsterFM video from 2012, you can see overhead wires that connect to the building near the meter. In the 21 minute video William Collier posted, if you pause around 12:34 you can see a electric pole with transformer on it. I think at one point an overhead wire ran from this pole to the transmitter building but was probably removed when service got disconnected some years ago.
@@TheBroadcastEngineer I have watched several videos on the topic and all power is missing from the pole (50 ft away) to below the meter. The building has also been stripped of copper internally.
I was a radio jocky in the late 70's early 80's and trust me you know when you arent transmitting..... people CALL !!
Someone needs to get what the police know. Maybe get a copy of the police report. It is illegal to make a false police report.
Great vid.. I'm wondering if there is any maintenance records or insurance inspections on the tower that would give some dates... ? Stay safe 🏴
I doubt there would be. Seeing the condition of the site…
I want to see the maintenance bills for upkeeping the AM station, if it was up and running over the last 12 years, they would have had to have purchased parts and equipment at some point.
I think the antenna fell to the ground due to disrepair, probably over a year ago. They scrapped everything on site, stopped the AM broadcast and kept broadcasting to 101.5FM. The FCC found the AM signal was down and they made up this entire story to cover themselves. When looking at the area from google streetview, we can se that the tower was already gone in march 2023. Very suspicious.
Isn't the idea of a translator, that it inputs the signal from one frequency (the AM), translates it to a new frequency (FM). so if the AM should go down there would be no input to the translator, so it would also go silent.
So how was there audio on the FM if there was no AM?
Yes, sort of. They can feed the translator with audio directly but it should still shut off when the main station goes off.
The missing electric meter is a bit odd. . .
After watching your video and the kids' video of the site I think there's a lot more to this story than has been told and here are a few thoughts:
1. Are we sure Fred and Shaggy are at the right location? In your video you show the Google street view shots showing two towers near one another, but I don't see the other standing tower in footage.
2. Is the remaining tower this channel's FM tower? If yes, then is there any way the AM transmitter could have been (a long time ago) relocated to the buildings housing the FM transmitter, and could you transmit 1KW AM on the FM antenna another location with a much smaller antenna to maintain the appearance that they were still transmitting AM as per their licensing requirement?
3. The station has had financial troubles, as an earlier $1,500 fine for a late filing was waived because of financial hardship. Thus, it would not surprise me that the tower was uninsured. (Which brings up the question--does FCC or anyone require towers to be insured?)
4. It sounds to me that they were probably in violation of the law requiring them to broadcast in AM as a condition for rebroadcasting in FM (Which sounds like kind of a dumb law anyway, but it is what it is.)
5. Who tipped the media off to this story?
1) Yep. Google street view, google satellite view, comparing to license… it’s the right location. The other tower isn’t super close so you wouldn’t see it in the satellite view I had.
2) The two towers in the Street View are WJLX and another unrelated station. The towers you see in my Google Earth flyover at the beginning of the flyover are unrelated towers next to the airport. If they had moved the AM they didn’t notify the FCC and apply for a change. That would be just as illegal.
3) I wasn’t aware of the earlier fine waive. FCC doesn’t require insurance, but your local municipality may require it. I’m not familiar with the rules and laws of Alabama.
4) That does appear to be the case. It’s not a dumb law because AM stations were practically given an FM translator. So for the special treatment, it’s tied to the operation of the AM. They’re more than welcome to purchase or apply for a full power FM frequency. No one is stopping them from ever doing that. But by all appearances it seems to me (in my opinion) that they were trying to skirt the rules and make their translator into a de facto full power station.
5) They station went out looking for donations with this sob story.
@@TheBroadcastEngineer Thanks.
1). Good to know.
2) I didn’t expect moving the broadcast antenna would be legal or that they would have applied as they should because that would cost money. I just didn’t know whether it would be at all possible or what kind of equipment it would take to broadcast 1KW or the minimum it would take to broadcast the AM to justify the retransmitter license. (I don’t know anything about any of this so thank you for your helpful video and taking the time to respond to my ramblings.)
3). The guy that did the onsite video posted a second video where he posted images of the FCC orders for the fine and subsequent waiver. That was in 2022, I believe, for a late filing of license renewal.
4). Cool. To be fair, I knew some guys who ran an independent rural radio station in Texas (this was 20 years ago), and I can’t imagine how financially difficult it must be to stay in business.
5). Never occurred to them that this would go viral.
On your question #2, no, it is not possible to transmit the AM signal on the FM antenna. The difference in physical size (and wavelength, which is determined by the frequency) is almost 100x. That's why the original AM antenna is an apprx 200' tall tower, that is the actual AM antenna.
I’m so glad you covered this. When I saw this on the news, I was like. Wait this makes absolutely no sense at all.
Hey im the guy that helped with filming williams video, seriously wow thank you for providing more evidence. Its cool to see how the story has taken off and who cares about it. amazing video dude thanks.
Many broadcast engineers pour their lives into maintaining these stations and to have someone seem to be less than truthful makes it difficult to leave this alone.
At the very least, the person representing himself as the owner and general manager has a different name than the name on the license. This looks more like a broadcasting marketing stunt however he may have crossed the line into actual fraud.
Station manager and owner are two different people.
He's crossed the line into multiple frauds and tax evasion.
0:47 I've heard of having the perfect face for radio, but this is the first time I've seen it.
I watched the walk-through video that you showed clips of and because I have done some tree falling and recovery work in the past I didn't see any signs of a tall mast falling to the ground nor did I see any sign of truck tracks that would have been needed to haul the tower off of the sight.
What I saw makes the Stations story rather suspect at best. You didn't see any transformer on the power pole that should have been there...
The transformer doesn't have to be on that last pole for a low draw situation, but the last 50 ft of service wire was missing between the pole and the building, plus the down-feed wire to the meter, and all of the copper was gutted from the building. (another video) I would bet it didn't all happen at the same time.
I don't get this. Are there no AM listeners or AM enthusiast who can say that it's been off the air since some specific date? I can't imagine a small station in the UK claiming such bollocks! Plenty of listeners and DXers will know when it stopped broadcasting. And it's obvious the site hasn't had any tx kit on it for years. Did he think no one would go to check the site? What's the guy playing at? If it's some financial scam it's pretty easy to expose!
I was one of the duped fools who contributed to their GoFundMe 😲😲
I guess we can assume that "thieves" aren't smart enough to realize the neither the tower nor the guy wires are copper.
Local prices for scrap steel are around 10 cents per pound but for copper, $ 3 per pound
1:40 1kW nondirectional 1240 AM, 101.5 FM translator
Pull the utility bill for the site. Likely no service for a LONG TIME.
This was an obvious fraud. Blatantly obvious. Thats at least 3 counts of fraud, fcc violations, etc.
Rather convenient that he just happened to have the power bills handy. It would be easy for the police to request the meter records from the power company to get the exact date they pulled the meter. That doesn't necessarily mean they stopped billing the account on that date.
Shame about the censer ship flag 🤤 the meter look a old 60 amp cable type witch is very old the rust and decay it most likely it fell on it's own after a strong wind the dog house looks it has been abandoned for many year's. the transmeter amp probably burned out a long time ago / scrapers probably found it in a abandoned state not that it makes right to take any of it. To stay operational it was all going to have to be all replaced unfortunately AM dosent have much of a market ? it probably was going cost over 200 k to bring it back.
I could be wrong and at times the wild card pops up.
But to me it seems the lot or Aera needs to have the grass cut around the building for access
this sounds like something id hear about on an unsolved mysteries youtube channel
If only I could do a good Robert Stack impression…
Lol this would be near my hometown in Etowah County.
I'm thinking that because they now meet the FCC requirement for a licensed station, using the nearby iHeart HD-3 frequency, they wouldn't ever have to rebuild the AM transmitter site. They would just keep the GoFundMe revenue and smile.
I just saw the other day that they're rebuilding the AM site. At least they mowed it...
What kind of federal and local charges could he face along with the penalties?
It was a victim of Alien Abduction. They have an affinity for primitive Terran technology. Some interstellar collector added it to It's collection. Lol😂 I am certain there is a logical answer to this mystery.
Hahaha!! 😂
It is possibly a go fund me scam. He was offered a tower and transmitter and declined the offer.
Let us recap. The AM has been off a while.
He reported it off but never repaired the transmitter and never told the fcc. He has another non commercial station that has the antenna located in the wrong place for some reason. Some say he tried to sell adds on it. I tuned into the AM station myself and never picked anything up last year on two occasions.
The AM tower site had a tower according to google earth in early 2022.
The power meter base looks like it was empty for a year or two.
Around Jasper the people are split between poor old Mr Elmore and the whole thing stinks.
We will see.
Another thing that has come up is the tower beacon light. It’s supposed to be 200 feet so it must have a beacon light. The FAA doesn’t know a thing about if and there may or may not be records of light bulb replacement.
He has many agencies asking questions.
As of last week the station was on the internet only. The FCC turned down his request for running the translator without the main station.
He went on for 20 minutes his last afternoon on the air making it sound like the mean old feds told him to shut it down.
Indeed. I think the tower was licensed just under 200 feet. I’ll have to look. But if that’s the case there’s no tower lighting requirement (with exceptions, there’s always exceptions). He got back on this past weekend with help from iHeart. They leased him an HD3 and he was able to turn his translator into that. So he kind of got what he wanted. A de facto full power FM station.
I forgot to mention a couple of things. He bought a station a couple of hundred miles from here. It was moved here and turned on. If I remember correctly stations can’t do that. There was no paperwork concerning the public good and market studies that anyone knows of. Been a long time since I read all the FCC regs, but just buying and moving into another market just because you can is a non starter.
His non commercial country station never been in compliance.
Sure seems a lot of rules were broken and then he is calling all kinds of attention to himself.
Even the European markets have heard of this matter.
We need a lot of things in Jasper, but this nonsense is not one of those things.
Definitely is a go fund me scam
@@TheBroadcastEngineer exceptions to tower lighting have to do with proximity to airports. Recalling 10 miles or less at 200 feet.
@@TheBroadcastEngineer What kind of listener base is there for a third tier HD channel? Has to be tiny.
From the moment I heard about this, it seemed shady to me. This is not theft, its fraud.
As of March 11, they have raised 21,838.
If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck...
It’s an EAS test? Oh wait…
It doesn’t matter is it was not in use or not maintained. Stolen is stolen and even if the owner is off on his maintenance it doesn’t change the fact his property was stolen.
But was it actually stolen? Or was it scrapped by the owner?
Great reporting, you got a new subscriber.
Thanks for watching and subscribing!
Where is pirate radio station AM 1710 broadcasting from? I hear it over KiWiSDR in Birminham AL
Not sure. You should t-hunt it and make a video! That would be fun!
@@TheBroadcastEngineer Yes it would be fun to do a fox hunt in AL. I live in Washington State. I listen remotely to radio stations using KiWiSDRs all over the US. If you search online for KiWiSDR, you can find the map of SDRs all over the world.
Lafayette Village
There's an unexpected lesson here: a lot of people jumped on the first report thinking "Thieves! They'll steal anything! Here's how to find them: blah blah blah." Me among them.
Now it appears to be a smokescreen authored by the owner.
I want to build a radio tower in the future but then how do I stop Thieves from stealing it
Visit the site often. Put up fences. Security cameras. Actually make an effort to maintain the site. It’s not hard. But it’s obvious this site hasn’t been visited in a long time.
@@TheBroadcastEngineer Thanks for the reply and also another question if I have a foundation filled with wet concrete and the metal beams are about to be put in. What if a cow or someone steps in the wet concrete or maybe someone throws a stone in the wet concrete or something bigger how do I prevent that from happening?
Did the local police/sheriff even go out to the site?
The news articles are unclear. Although, probably all the news articles are based off of one person reporting. My guess is that the police probably did go out there, took a few pictures, and not really knowing anything about broadcasting and towers, bought the story in its entirety.
Most cops are real dumb or don't care unless it'll get them in the news as a hero.
The sign out front of the WJLX studio also says WJBE. WJBE is a daytime only station, that has an fm translator broadcasting 24/7. So it is possibly allowed to run a translator with the AM station off air, but is it legal? I can’t find any connection between the two stations, so it is unclear why the studio sign says WJBE.
WJLX is on the air right now after entering into an agreement with another FM station that transmits in HD to transmit WJLX's programming on one of their secondary channels, then WJLX retransmits it analog on their translator. I know a station doing that here, now the same company owns the HD station too, and the translator is retransmitting the secondary channel in analog FM.
If I recall correctly, the station manager of JLX is on the board of JBE. Or something to that effect.
The utility meter was removed years ago, like 9 years ago, way before the tower was stolen.
The tower was stolen in the last 3 or 4 years, but the station has been off the air over 8 years.
The utility company will tell the FBI the number of the meter and when the station stopped using power and when they removed the meter.
There is no equipment, no STL dish, nothing, and the scrappers would have stolen the tower but where is the dish ?
They removed the AM transmitter many years ago.
This station owner was insane to think he could pull this off with the FBI.
He is going to go to prison for lying to the FBI.
I think this is FCC and DOJ not FBI, but I might be mistaken.
So iHeart got into the act now?
Yep. Some accounts make it sound like they offered.
This is a pretty closed community.
No doubts, somebody knows something about this. Prank or not this is theft. 🎉
Well, people see what they want to see. I saw that young man's video too, and didn't see anything conclusive. He had made up his mind, but if it was copper thieves, I'd think that they'd have taken the copper wire too. And the old guy wire could have been left over from previous work. I've been to a few AM transmitters, and a lot do look abandoned, because people dump on the property, and the station can't afford to keep paying to haul the junk away. I've seen plenty of old buildings with the original meter housing rusting away, and a brand new 400A service drop on another wall. The kid didn't show much, and I can't help but wonder why. I'm not voting to crucify anyone without all the evidence.
There’s no evidence that the tower was recently dropped, nor that there had been any type of service there for more than a few months. Remember the station manager claims it went off very shortly before the landscape crew went out there.
And I can speak as someone who has maintained both AM and FM broadcast sites.
I can show you many transmitter sites where it looks just as bad as the WJLX site, as far as landscaping goes.
Just because the trash and weeds and even small tree growth is there does not make the site an abandoned site.
Using proper forensics on the cut cables and metal will be the only way to tell when it was cut, and just because it is corroded does not make it years old.
As far as pictures by google and such, if it does not have evidence tags on them, they can not be used in a court of law.
And AM stations go down many times day and night due to maintenance and thunderstorms, so the lack of signal does not make for evidence of a missing transmitter.
Jumping to wild conclusions on a video that overlooks the antenna base, and the other structures on the property just makes for sloppy investigation and should be ignored until the official report comes out
I never said anything about a court of law. You can’t seriously be saying that the site as shown in the video was active site. I’ve seen transmitter sites that were overgrown. But not with everything else shown in the original video. Sounds like you need to watch William Collier’s full video that I linked to, and then come back and try to say that it could have been a working transmitter site.
But let’s say it was. Then shame on the engineer who maintained that site. But then again it seems like this station doesn’t have any engineer or a contract with an engineer to maintain it. And they didn’t know that the station was off until the landscaping crew went out there, allegedly.
I’ve maintained transmitter sites in some rugged places for over 20 years. I knew when one of my sites went down. Or even if they hiccuped.
@@TheBroadcastEngineerI would agree, however, when two people with no experience in forensics or radio broadcasting, trample all over an active crime scene, and don't inspect anything of importance besides some chain link fencing that has been laying in a heap for several years, while the tower base and guy line anchors get nothing looked at, it is obvious they are just walking around without any knowledge of what they are doing.
Check for permits. Someone would needed to pull a permit to tear down the tower.