As someone with an amateur extra license and a VEC, this smells like some sort of insurance fraud.
Theres just no conceivable way in my mind your commercial antenna vanishes and you dont know...nobody checked the swr? The eas output? A litany of regular federal inspections never produced an issue?
Currently studying for my HAM license here....I know darn well antenna equipment is not cheap as I'm into software defined radio as a hobby and while I can't transmit I can receive....I assure you that you have to be grossly incopitent to not miss an antenna that size and antennas are not cheap.
Commercial small town AM station owner with a license to re-broadcast on FM as part of an FCC program to help AM stations survive (by giving them exposure on the FM dial, but they must keep broadcasting on AM)...took down his AM tower years ago according to satellite/streetview, changed the logo on the site to de-emphasize the AM band and instead carry the FM band, then for some reason drew a lot of attention to himself claiming the tower was stolen. It looks like it was possibly either as part of a plan to exploit people, or suddenly someone noticed and started asking questions.
He then put up a gofundme.
He apparently had no monitoring of any kind. Nobody in town knows nothin' (nobody noticed the AM broadcast going away, and nobody noticed trucks hauling out tons upon tons of metal etc), scrap dealers (who are clearly the most ethical, honest sort) know nothin', the tower would not have sufficient value to justify such a brazen theft as it's not copper. Broadcast techs/operators who kinda all know each other, also know nothing and are calling the situation questionable to outright bullshit depending on how polite they are.
Geerling and his dad are erring very much on the polite-but-this-doesn't-add-up side which is responsible. I their video they also share photos of them doing a planned takedown of a tower that took weeks/months and still went a bit 'sideways' and left a clear channel of damaged trees where it fell.
The situation is muddied by some young/dumb youtuber going to the wrong site where there is another abandoned tower site, as well as the correct site having two transmitters/towers on it until the AM station's tower was taken down.
I think there's also at least one video a few years old of someone parked at the site with their radio tuned to the AM frequency, getting nothing.
From the comments on one of the videos:
====
@ianlawrence4993
22 minutes ago
Thank you for the video. It really is crazy how most large news organizations are failing to ask basic questions about this story and keep falling for Elmore’s dog and pony show.
From Google Street View images, it appears that the tower has been dismantled (or at least mostly dismantled) for around a year or so. All of these photos were taken from basically the same location (accounting for digital zoom).
Also, from the Internet Archive it appears WJLX changed the masthead logo on their website in the middle of 2022. The old “Jasper’s Oldies” logo advertised both the 1240 AM channel and the 101.5 FM channel. The new “Voice of Walker County” logo only advertises the 101.5 FM channel.
They have brought back the old logo to make it appear that they are an AM station when their marketing has ignored that for almost 2 years now. It seems to me that they stopped broadcasting in AM no later than 2022, and given their previous proceedings with the FCC probably much earlier than that. It is telling that in the interviews with local residents for this story, there is no clarification on whether or not they had listened to the AM channel specifically any time recently.
> nobody noticed trucks hauling out tons upon tons of metal etc), scrap dealers (who are clearly the most ethical, honest sort)
If you look at images of mast towers, there isn't much there. Basically a metal scaffold with the antenna at the top. If you look at this tower[1], a 85 foot tower is about 480 lbs, and the radio tower was supposedly around 200 feet tall so , it's probably less than 1200 lbs of metal. Probably a fairly large load but probably not really unusual.
> The situation is muddied by some young/dumb youtuber
going to the wrong site where there is another abandoned
tower site, as well as the correct site having two
transmitters/towers on it until the AM station's tower
was taken down.
Can you expand on how you determined that they went to the wrong site? The only other AM station within many miles is WIXI [1], which is 0.35 miles away and has a white building [2], unlike the one shown in the video.
The pictures shown in the OP's link only show that there were two towers (WIXI an WJLX) and eventually one (WIXI).
One-third of a mile in a wooded area is far enough to not show in the video.
That’s sound about right for small town Alabama. I’m in East Alabama and we have a local broadcast owner who is probably disappointed that he didn’t think of this first.
Also I'm pretty sure you can buy sattelite photos via certain companies for this area.
I can't remember the exact name of the org but its citizens something....learned about it during OSNIT for military intelligence on the middle easy and other areas via youtube
Yeah I agree with you regarding how suspicious the entire thing seemed. Sure I'll bite...many some druggies or scrap metal guys who don't care about the law saw the tower as a big payday but I can assure you their would be evidence of it coming down.
I mean even if some helicopter managed to puck it up and fly off in the dead of night....you'd still see the cable hitting stuff.
Speculation but many the FCC started asking questions about the stations operational "difficulties" and he got jumpy or scared and figured the best way to deal with it was get rid of the tower and hope the press coverage drowns out any other issues he might have had.
TLDR: someone did something wrong...but we don't know who it is
I'll attempt to summarize information coming from many different sources to help people out and provide context.
WJLX is a radio station in Jasper Alabama. It operates a standard music+talk radio station that they brand as "WJLX 101.5". They are licensed to operate on AM 1240 frequency. But most (seemingly all... as addressed later) of their audience listen on the FM 101.5 version of the channel which is a simulcast of the AM 1240 frequency. They don't have a dedicated FM license, but are able to legally use this 101.5 FM frequency due to a loophole for old AM stations that allows them to reach FM audiences by translating the AM station on an FM frequency. This means that if the AM broadcast stops, that they immediately lose rights to broadcast on FM 101.5, which is the frequency they brand their station under and most/all their audience is. All this information is important as will be apparent soon.
The station owns an AM Radio tower for its "primary" frequency. The story goes that a brush cleaning crew was hired to clean up tall brush around the station, as is required. They showed up and found no tower there. They called the tower owner who then confirmed that the brush cleaners were at the right place. He then drove down to the site and when he got there, confirmed the tower was gone. So he then called the police who showed up and deemed that the tower must have been stolen.
As soon as the FCC heard that the tower was gone, that means the AM station isn't broadcasting which means that WJLX is no longer allowed to broadcast on the FM frequency since they are only allowed to do it as a translation of the AM, which no longer exists. The station was ordered to go offline within 24 hours of the tower being reported stolen.
The station has been operating at a loss for its entire existence and relied on public broadcasting government grants to break even. It can't afford to rebuild the tower. So it started a GoFundMe to rebuild the tower. Looking for $60k and currently has around $20k towards that goal.
Since this news broke that a 200 foot tower (2/3 the length of a football field) dissapeared without a trace, it has started getting a lot of attention. The station owner is standing by the fact that it was "stolen". Internet sleuths are trying to figure out if this is plausible. OP's link is to various Google street view images that show that the last recorded image of this tower standing was in October 2022. It shows that another streetview image in March 2023 shows the tower missing.
This means two things:
1. The tower went down between October 22 - March 23
2. The tower has been down for almost a year and was just reported stolen a few days ago
So how did the station owner not notice for a year that his tower was missing?
Some people are speculating that the stolen tower is a ruse to gain attention and sympathy to fund building a new tower. It came out recently that the owner had let the insurance on the tower lapse. So he has no way to rebuild it. He is unable to afford it and it was uninsured.
Within a day of the tower being reported missing, some nearby software developers decided to go out on a saturday and investigate the tower site to see what they found. The video is here: https://youtu.be/78PvlGCqM84?si=5II7VeKY1tv41mXL . Namely they confirmed that its been down for a long time. The video might be interesting to see the state of disrepair of the location.
So now the mystery is whether the tower was really stolen and if so, how did they do it with no one noticing? A lot of people are suggesting that the owner is manufacturing the theft story in order to gain sympathy for his GoFundMe.
Here's a video where two guys visit the site of where the antenna was supposed to be. Vegitation overgrowth of the remains suggest it's been at least one growing season since it was removed. Looks like it was inopperational well before that.
But apparently they went to the wrong site. According to [1], the WJLX tower was next to another tower (for WIXI) which is still standing, but that second tower is not visible anywhere in the video.
The WIXI site, 0.35 miles away, has a white building [1] [2] [3]. One-third of a mile distance in a forested area is a reasonable distance to not see the WIXI tower from the ground.
I'm pretty sure the YouTube video is at the correct location. It's clearly not at WIXI.
Well, yeah, that is not in dispute. The question is: how do we know they were at the WJLX site and not just some random abandoned building in the middle of nowhere?
The owner probably noticed but didn't care. Presumably the only reason they still had it was because they were legally required to so they could keep operating on FM.
And I doubt the FCC is constantly monitoring any random AM station if nobody complains.
They definitely spot signals that shoudn't be there, even AM radio stations.
I think no one at the FCC cared, the broadcaster knew the tower was gone and also didn't care since their main concern was apparently running the FM station.
> Elmore explained that they were alerted to the theft on Friday when a bush hog crew arrived at the WJLX tower site in Jasper to clean up the property, only to find it completely cleared out by the thieves.
You don't get alerted that the tower and the transmitter are gone by bush crew. You get alerted by the signal being gone. He should have been paged 2 seconds after the signal stopped.
The guy ropes and fallen fences are overgrown, the electricity meter has clearly been missing for months at the very least. There's no evidence like crushed plants indicating the tower having fallen any time recently.
The station's FM license was part of an FCC scheme to improve the economics of struggling AM stations, and because the aim was to strengthen AM not replace it, the license requires them to continue broadcasting on AM.
My guess is they've been broadcasting in violation of that license for years, someone called them on it, and they had to concoct this "stolen tower" story to cover that up.
> The Jasper, Alabama, station was ordered off air by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as authorities continue to investigate how and why the heavy steel structure suddenly disappeared.
> “In all my years of being in the business, around the business, everything like that, I have never seen anything like this,” Elmore told The Post.
> “You don’t hear of a 200-foot tower being stolen,” he added.”
> While the self-proclaimed “Sound of Walker County,” still has its FM transmitter and tower, it is not allowed to operate while the AM station is off the air, according to FCC.
The FCC does not monitor broadcasts for presence or content. They do respond to complaints (typically interference), but a missing signal creates no interference.
If someone else wanted that AM allocation, they would have filed a complaint that the licensee was not operating, and the license would be cancelled.
It's also not typical to monitor your own signal directly. You have telemetry coming back from the transmitter site. This includes antenna VSWR which would spike if the antenna disappeared. Or no telemetry at all, if the transmitter building lost power or was raided etc.
There is zero possibility that a compliant licensee would not be aware of an antenna loss within seconds of it happening. So the question becomes what level of noncompliance this licensee was operating under. Sounds to me like they were cheating because AM transmissions are low ROI.
A tiny operation like this? I doubt they had anything close to telemetry. Rather, they probably had a tech who visited the site ever couple months. Nothing in the shack/tower would have required daily maintenance. Their only realtime "telemetry" might have been when the power bill for the site was lower than normal.
Even without a proper modulation monitor, simply tuning a radio to the station will tell you if you're on-air or not.
The operators knew. They just didn't care. Or they may not have known that the tower had been stolen and assumed the transmitter was broken and were procrastinating to fix it.
Moreover, I can't imagine anyone successfully tearing down a working antenna. My guess is the timeline went: transmitter stops working, site sits idle for a few months, thieves notice it's turned off, raid the place, station owner finally decides to do something about it, discovers they've been cleared out.
Especially because the transmitters disappeared, too. ALL the station equipment disappearing? Wonder who's got it now, or what it's been parted out to for other AM radio stations scraping together gear to keep running.
Smash and grabs of transmitter building equipment are relatively quick. They set off alarms (usually) of course, but you can get out in 15 minutes with a few racks of gear.
Taking down a tower requires more time and care. And tools. And it pays less for scrap, although the black market for the kind of equipment you find in a transmitter building is small and not well-capitalized.
Telemetry is cheap in the scheme of broadcast expenses.
If the station is operating on a shoestring budget, you have at least one human who cares that the revenue-generating operations (broadcast signal) are happening.
Similarly that person would notice the change in power expenses.
Even in the lowest-tech, least-compliant of stations, someone would notice an antenna and/or tower loss within a day. This reads like a case of severe neglect, almost certainly intentional, and possibly fraudulent.
This charitable explanation hinges on the assumption that they want to run an AM station.
Given that their license is for a FM rebrodcaster, it seems like the FM business is the one they care about more, and the AM signal was just being used as a means to an end.
You're right. They clearly did not want to run the AM station, and it was likely a negative ROI operation.
My assertion though, is that there's no chance that they were unaware that the AM station was down.
The only path to plausible deniability requires extreme non-compliance, which risks fines and could even threaten their ability to hold other licenses / operate other stations.
So they're in trouble either way, but this story of surprise is absolute crap.
I'm not familiar with the rules here but is not caring a complaint route to a defense? It can be in many other fields.
I.e. purposefully don't have any monitoring, purposefully don't go to the site often etc. then only respond of someone tells you there's a problem.
I've dealt with a few contracts in the past that have stipulated that we must respond within xx hours of becoming aware of an issue, if I didn't want to run the service it would be in my interests to do everything in my power not to avoid becoming aware of any issues.
No. If you hold a license, you are obligated to operate the station at the licensed power. Not caring is not allowed.
In this case, they were required to operate the AM station to keep their FM license. In addition to the usual threats to license and fines etc, they were also risking their FM license which persumably was ROI positive.
You appear to be conflating a few things. The 'contractor' timeliness of xx hours is typically stipulated in a contract as an Service Level Agreement (SLA) parameter.
There are regulatory causes for 'xx' response times as well, outside of a contract.
The first part you brought up was willful ignorance[0] which would likely come into play with licensing, insurability, as well as tort and criminal liabilities.
Assume the AM is a negative-ROI operation. Thus why would they care about quality? Why would there be *any* form of quality check? Any check requires effort and thus makes the ROI even more negative.
I can see scrappers stealing the tower and nobody bothered to find out. I can also see scrappers stealing the tower, the station knew but since it's negative-ROI they pretended they didn't.
Because the part of their operation that presumably is ROI-positive (the FM transmitter) is technically a rebroadcast of whatever they are transmitting on AM. If the quality of the AM signal is actually so bad that nobody can receive it, then they will forfeit their FM license too.
That article does not talk about the FCC monitoring ordinary licensees for "silence" (which I assume means off-air i.e. transmitter turned off, and not dead-air i.e. broadcast of silent audio).
(Dead air is actually a bigger sin than off-air. Off-air happens. Dead air should almost never happen.)
The article talks about monitoring stations who have a history of poor usage of their license. And it's not clear that "monitor" here would mean any active steps, vs just requiring the usual mandatory reporting of unscheduled, unpermitted, extended off-air events.
But the FCC does not routinely monitor for dead air or any other violations. They do respond to complaints of all kinds. In competitive markets, licensees monitor each other.
You should read the linked decisions in the article.
The FCC learned about the dead air because the stations themselves filed Special Temporary Authority paperwork with the FCC specifying that the station carrier was not active during that time.
So, it was not active monitoring, but passive paperwork review, triggered by the license application itself, that caused the ruling.
The FCC does not actively monitor stations in any way.
In some markets, they are still operating off of NTSC tape formats and equipment. They have a device to upres the content to HD right before going to the transmitter. All because they are in such a small market, and there's not enough money to justify buying HD equipment.
Everyone seems to think that TV stations are all on the same level of the flagships for each network. Some of them still are less than what you'd see in the movie UHF.
> He should have been paged 2 seconds after the signal stopped.
I think you're greatly overestimating the technical sophistication of this operation. I'm not saying they didn't notice sooner, but I doubt they had this sort of modern monitoring system set up. It seems like the sort of operation that has been coasting on minimal money/effort for many years.
It is not legal to operate a remote transmitter site without full telemetry coming back to a human (studio) operator, or (more recently) an automated system which will alert a chief engineer, which is a required designee of all licensees.
The question remains: in what ways were they operating noncompliantly?
However there's almost zero possibility that they were unaware of their antenna loss until the brush crew showed up. Unless the theft happened overnight (some AM stations shut down at night).
Even if nothing else clued them in, a transmitter without an antenna will basically shut down, and the electric bill will go to near zero.
According to Wikipedia, the station has changed hands a few times in recent years because the owners kept going bankrupt, and furthermore the station has gone off the air numerous times before due to deferred maintenance. So noncompliance seems like a very safe bet!
In light of that, it's possible they had no functional telemetry or nobody was paying attention to it, and therefore, it's plausible they really didn't notice when the antenna went missing. But if I were the feds, I would be investigating the possibility that the operators themselves sold the antenna for scrap...
> I would be investigating the possibility that the operators themselves sold the antenna for scrap...
This might sound far-fetched to many, but it's a real thing. Galvanized steel has a decent scrap value. Taking down a tower is not a trivial project, but it happens.
I was responsible for a 800-ft tower in a past life, and a pager, a 4x4 truck, and a gun were considered required equipment. I opted for the first two, but wasn't prepared to commit to the responsibilities of the third.
The most common theft scenario was an equipment smash-and-grab. But tower thefts were not unheard of.
US? I'm guessing you mean smaller towers like ~50' used for local links, utility radios, etc. Or do you mean like 75' or 150'+? Do people grab commercial towers?
Small towers are much easier, but big towers get hit sometimes too. Usually when they are in a transitioning period (new, major maintenance, decomm) because the bigger the tower, typically the more antennas are on it, and the more parties who will notice it's disappearance quickly.
> It is not legal to operate a remote transmitter site without [...]
47 CFR § 73.1400(b) permits operation with “a self-monitoring or ATS-monitored and controlled transmission system that, in lieu of contacting a person designated by the licensee, automatically takes the station off the air within three hours of any technical malfunction which is capable of causing interference” (emphasis added).
This doesn’t change the licensee’s basic responsibility “for assuring that at all times the station operates [...] in accordance with the terms of the station authorization,” of course.
> in what ways were they operating noncompliantly?
If the station was off the air and the licensee didn’t notify the FCC within 10 days and seek a silent STA within 30 days, that would violate 47 CFR § 73.1740(a)(4).
Ah, thank you. There is also the "dead mans switch" monitoring option, which is probably in use at some very understaffed stations.
So this licensee's best claim is that they had some kind of major equipment failure, their dead mans switch worked and took them off-air, and someone jumped on the opportunity to take down a non-energized radiator tower and steal their equipment.
It is still unbelievable of course! The best time to find someone at a remote transmitter site is when the tower has recently gone dark. And it does not address the gap between failure and awareness/reporting.
Thanks also for the cite to the notification requirement timelines.
Which is why I trust corporations more than small businesses. Big companies can't cut corners in quite the same way as tiny shops, nor can they directly violate health&safety regulations, creating health risk for customers, without fear of consequences.
> Big companies can't cut corners in quite the same way as tiny shops,
Big companies have their own distinct ways, true. They have massive resources to deploy against regulation and oversight. By forestalling accountability or insuring it results in disproportionately small fines, they can insure non-compliance is strongly profitable. This satisfies the interests that matter most to a public corp, execs and investors.
> Big companies can't ... directly violate health&safety regulations, creating health risk for customers, without fear of consequences.
At least I would not knowingly commit crimes so the private equity makes some tens of thousands of dollars and I get a “meets expectations” and 2% annual raise at best if doing so could put me at risk of going to prison.
> if doing so could put me at risk of going to prison
The percentage of execs who are convicted - or even tried (for crimes that would gain most of us a harsh penalty) is so low it's striking when it happens.
When you have corporate-sized resources (that can outweigh the even the government's) to prevent accountability, those odds tend to be strongly in your favor.
It's not that hard, and most of the smaller AM and FM facilities I've seen (ones where snakes nest on top of the transmitter and wild turkeys try to chase off the engineer the one time a year the tower gets a visit) still have some sort of monitor. Plus... especially with AM, there's always at least one old folk sitting there with it on 24-7. It's usually a race between the engineer and that older person to see who calls the studio or owner first!
I have called my local station about dead air a couple times. I was the first to tell them. One time in recent memory, it went on for so long that I forgot the radio was on when they came back.
FM has more bandwidth per channel, so better sound. And stereo. Doesn't matter much for talk radio, but it sounds like this station was mixed music/talk?
Some modern listeners don't even know what AM stations are.
AM has better propagation (lower frequency), but inherently more noise (amplitude modulated).
The FCC is big, but no. They dont have surveillance vans scouting the country to confirm thag every radio station is actually transmitting. Im sure they might have reacted had someone told them of this apparant scam, but who is going to notice the absence of a small AM station these days?
Sounds like the type of thing that would be great for civilian volunteers to do. Amateur radio licensees already do a good job of self monitoring their bands. Maybe offer them some kind of recognition if they monitor a commercial station not living up to its license requirements. Probably could automate the whole thing with a Raspberry Pi and an SDR.
You could automate the whole thing with zero additional hardware, just occasionally polling the existing kiwisdr network.
You could also trilaterate the physical source of each frequency using TDoA, since all Kiwi samples are time-tagged with the integrated also-software-defined GPS receiver.
Generate alerts if a licensed-stationary source appears to move, etc..?
Track high-power CB abusers?
The sky's the limit, just someone has to care, and be good with software, and both of those things have to overlap in the same person.
> It is hard to imagine the FCC wouldn’t notice that there was no signal on that AM station for that amount of time, or the owner, or the power company.
Maybe the typical approach of having flaky monitoring and after enough time, you simply chalk it up to "well, seems the monitoring is offline again, but no one is complaining so probably the thing still works"?
Alternatively, the owner did notice it was missing, but reporting it as missing would also mean they have to shut down FM service, so they left it until someone complained/noticed.
You're confusing two different parties involved in the monitoring here: the FCC and the station owner.
The station owner likely knew within a few hours to a few days that the tower went offline. At the very least the power bill would have been very low or non-existent that month which would make it pretty obvious. And to your point they could tune their FM radio to their station frequency and see if it works.
The FCC is a federal organization. I doubt they have an office in Jasper Alabama. So the FCC monitoring is the one in question here. Because as soon as the FCC notices the AM station is down, then the FM translation (which is what the station was really marketed around and gaining its viewership from) is shut down. Which means the station owner is out of a job. The FCC's monitoring is probably not realtime and I could see someone at the FCC getting an alert that this AM station in Jasper Alabama is down and they do think to themselves the monitoring is bad or flaky and don't immediately panic. The FCC isn't going to be able to just tune their radio to the AM station to check since they aren't in range of the station.
The photos only seem to show that there wasn't a 'standing' tower there. Maybe it fell and not enough people listened to notice the drastically degraded signal, and the owners just didn't care?
I don't really get the regulatory aspect, but they're seemingly only operating this AM station as some sort of stipulation for their FM license? If that's true, why do people care? Why does the FCC care?
For commercial AM, especially for a tower like this, typically the whole tower is an unshielded, energized antenna. If it fell over it would be shorting to ground and probably not transit much of anything at all.
No problem. A lot of commercial radio dealing with many thousands of watts+ gets into some pretty exotic stuff that most people just would never encounter and think about. Stuff that makes sense when you think about it, but most never really need to.
Check out this video, they go into what operations look like at a probably similar but better run commercial AM radio tower. Still probably a lot of the same concepts. There's a cool clip of them arcing off the tower to ground and you can hear the audio through the plasma.
And yeah, I feel ya, the hobby is often filled crusty old get off my lawn kind of people. There's still a lot of nice people to meet on the air as well, and hopefully with the FCC rethinking rules about digital operations on ham bands it could open up to some more interesting stuff soon. I've had a good bit of fun and learned a good bit getting a tech, probably going to get my general soon and take advantage of this solar cycle. Now's the time to get into the hobby instead of waiting a few years.
Wow-- multiple downvotes for asking a few honest questions.
I looked into getting my technician's license at a few points over the years remembering how much fun I had listening to my dad's friend talk to folks from across the world on his capable home rig. If you ask someone in the amateur radio scene what it's like, they'll paint a utopian picture of community bonding around a shared passion.
... But man, if that's true, y'all sure hide it well behind an incredibly frosty exterior.
Every few years I'll lurk on radio forums and social media to get a sense of the community-- as I do with many other current/potential hobbies-- and it reveals a punitive, cantankerous, spiteful, and patronizing stance towards anyone that isn't already 'in the club.' I've been using the net since about 1993 and have seen a whole lot of toxic communities in my life, but man... the online ham communities I've seen were bad. Then I see people in them blaming poor character among younger generations for not taking the torch. Yeah... sure. That's it, bud. Surely it has nothing to do with the people in your forum that race to belittle someone asking to be pointed in the right direction. And heaven help them if they have a feminine sounding username. It's like a perpetual feedback loop of the angry nerd crowd dynamic that's slowly becoming less acceptable in tech culture as the decades pass.
Surely if it's a rule there's a reason behind it, no? I imagine I'd care about avoiding whatever negative impact the rule was mitigating. But when rules become an end rather than a means to an end, there's no clearer separation between what's legal and what's ethical. Just rules are necessary for an organized society, but rules aren't automatically just merely because they exist.
One thing I still haven’t understood after reading far too much about this strange story, is why the requirement is there. Like, why can’t they just apply for a regular FM license on the frequency they already use?
They went with the license they did because it's cheaper. They can't just get a regular license at that frequency quickly because, according to the FCC:
> THE FCC IS NOT ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR NEW FM COMMERCIAL BROADCAST STATIONS AT THE PRESENT TIME.
Even if they were, your application just puts the allocation up for the next auction. I don't think the FCC has held an auction in a long time.
I mean, that's the reason they can't ask for one, but I'm more interested in the reason why the FCC said they can't ask for one.
Is it because of pointless administrative gridlock? If so, good on them for finding a way to get around some bureaucrat's unwillingness to wield their approval stamp.
Is it because of some technical reason? Ok, bummer, but that's totally different. If it's someone's bottom line vs a public resource, that's that... but I get the sense the FCC would have said that explicitly, no?
FCC just cares that the paperwork is filed and nobody complains.
Just because you have a license doesn't mean you have to use it.
> The radio station had an FCC license that required they operate an AM transmitter. Now that the FCC has found out that they are not broadcasting on AM, the station is not allowed to continue on FM.
This (from the other thread) seems to be the pertinent part.
Actually you are obligated to use a license, or to return it. You cannot hold a license for the AM/FM/TV broadcast bands and not operate on it for any length of time.
As a comparison value: in Germany, you can loose your FM license for inactivity if you broadcast 90 seconds of silence. We had to care for stuff like this when we did some remote discussion rounds on community radio during the pandemic and had to have some logic close to the transmitter that would add innocuous background music if anything went wrong upstream.
Dead air is a very big deal in the US too. The argument is something like "licensees exist to serve the public and obviously dead air does not serve, but more importantly means that a listener might stay tuned into silence when an emergency alert is broadcast over all other stations".
It's sort of tenuous, although not wrong. Off-air is a better state than dead air.
in the 90s I remember 2-3 songs that had a couple seconds of dead-air, and the stations would modify them to play cheesy sound effects during that time. I always thought they were paranoid about someone changing the channel, but now I think it is more to be compliant.
Actually I think your first idea is more likely. I don't think the FCC would be concerned about a short gap in a song, or a pause in conversation, or a silent part of a live performance, etc.
But commercial program directors are neurotic beasts. And listeners can definitely be fickle!
One story I've heard is that PDs obsess over car listeners, who are punching "seek" (or a different preset) at the slightest provocation. They believed that a couple-second silent gap in a song would lose X listeners. They might have even had data to back it up.
I've seen song gaps trimmed, or filled with a quick station ID. Philistines!
I used to change channels like that! with terrestrial radio at least, because you can skip commercials quickly and then skip songs you don't like! Now with XM taking slightly longer to tune, (and with age) I do it less.
Your first two sentences are contradicted by the quote and your followup.
Ues the FCC cares and yes they must use it, when using the FM teansmitter.
The FCC most certainly should be monitoring these compliance requirements. I suspect someone at the FCC noticed they weren't transmitting, asked, then the owner claimed the just found out.. someone stole the tower!
Which probably makes sense - either listeners or other broadcasters will complain, or a problem is not that urgent. And eventually the licensee will call the New York Times, everyone will find out, and the FCC can take action.
It seems the AM station was missing for at least a year, so evidently the FCC wasn't paying very close attention. They probably didn't notice/care until somebody else brought it to their attention.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the situation was something along the lines of: they were having financial difficulties and decided they could get away with not broadcasting on AM…sold the tower and equipment for scrap. Eventually someone notices and notifies the FCC. FCC contacts the operator and eventually they send out a bush hog crew to make the “discovery”.
How would they have realtime monitoring unless they have a receiver in every city in the country? This happened in Jasper Alabama, not Los Angeles California.
I think its possible that they only send someone out once a year to check for active frequencies. When they see a problem (AM 1259 is missing) then they send out the brush crew.
Point being, I highly doubt that realtime monitoring exists everywhere. The owner of this station probably banked on the fact that no one's watching Jasper Alabama that closely. When someone at the FCC gets their annual paperwork about this station, they probably just do a cursory check on it and push it through, not putting a lot of time or energy into this tiny station.
Their [2] is a direct link to a Youtube comment (note the lc param). The linked comment will be pinned at the top of the comments, but it doesn't matter because the channel already pinned the same comment.
Text of the comment is below:
@GeerlingEngineering 2 days ago
*Update* (Feb 14): YouTuber @WilliamCollier visited the tower site on Monday and documented the tower base, fence, building... and details like a missing power meter. Lots of evidence points to a tower site that's been unused for a long time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqIysr3o_vY (warning: language)
Before you consider donating to the station's GoFundMe, I would recommend waiting to hear the full story. There's more to this story than a tower being suddenly stolen (which is definitely not what happened here), forcing a small community FM station off the airwaves.
I make it a policy to never donate to a situation I hear about on the internet, especially if there’s a gofundme. Maybe that’s an overreaction it just seems like a good heuristic for ‘this is likely a scam’
I think the risk of ill-gotten gains is offset by the stupidity of people willing to donate to them. I dont really have +/- feelings about either party in that situation.
What I find funny is how gofundme (I hate that name, it sounds so entitled) is 3/4 of the way to re-discovering this thing called insurance. All they need is to somehow promote/emphasize people who donated previously should they ever find themselves in need. i.e. if you donated 5x during the year to car accident victims, at a cost of $x00, should you get in a car wreck, you should be able to use evidence of your donations to get a spotlight on the site. Voila, tech bro comes full-circle and "disrupts" insurance pools (by exploiting a loophole around all those pesky state regulations, lets make "insurance commissioners" the new cab driver )
Assuming that the Google Streetview didn't just have a different lens that time (it's pretty washed out and on the edge of its resolution), let's assume that it was actually gone.
It's very difficult to imagine someone knowing that the station was gone if they really didn't care if it existed or not. Why would they be incented to track it if all their listeners were on AM?
(OT, but this simulcasting license from the FCC seems more like an effort to finally kill off AM than to strengthen it, since essentially all radios handle FM now and have for at least my entire life. If you could receive the same broadcast on FM, why wouldn't you choose that instead? You can get FM stations even in the middle of nowhere, and they're not crackly.)
some years ago a server (maybe a name or signing server) went missing and popped up months or years later in Russia, it was a really strange thing that did some rounds in some security circles and I cannot remember any details or where I would find more information, I'm posting here, once again to see if anyone has any recollection.
Stolen, or deliberately scrapped by the owners? It’s entirely possible they legitimately thought that the FCC wouldn’t care about the AM requirement in their license.
The owners would almost certainly know that the thing went offline. They would have a maintenance schedule, and power bills to pay.
Is it at all possible that they outsourced the physical maintenance - including paying the power bills - of the tower to someone else, who in turn screwed them over?
