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.
