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"Stolen" radio tower missing for at least a year
- itpcc 3y agoObligatorily, Geerling Engineering (by Jeff Geerling and his father) video discuss this issue last week [1]. EDIT: Seems likely the tower is already unused [2]. Maybe they think they can getaway without AM Tx? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZSxb8QIIa4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZSxb8QIIa4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZSxb8QIIa4&lc=Ugyb6d-c8ai0cawR3Qd4AaABAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZSxb8QIIa4&lc=Ugyb6d-c8ai0c...
- wut42 3y agoYour [2] is the same video. Did you wanted to link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78PvlGCqM84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78PvlGCqM84 ?
- schiffern 3y agoTheir [2] is a direct link to a Youtube comment (note the lc param). The linked comment will be pinned at the top of the comments, but it doesn't matter because the channel already pinned the same comment. Text of the comment is below: @GeerlingEngineering 2 days ago *Update* (Feb 14): YouTuber @WilliamCollier visited the tower site on Monday and documented the tower base, fence, building... and details like a missing power meter. Lots of evidence points to a tower site that's been unused for a long time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqIysr3o_vY (warning: language) Before you consider donating to the station's GoFundMe, I would recommend waiting to hear the full story. There's more to this story than a tower being suddenly stolen (which is definitely not what happened here), forcing a small community FM station off the airwaves.
- rubyfan 3y agoI make it a policy to never donate to a situation I hear about on the internet, especially if there’s a gofundme. Maybe that’s an overreaction it just seems like a good heuristic for ‘this is likely a scam’
- geerlingguy 3y agoExperience bears that out like 99% of the time. My only exception is when I know and trust the person setting up the fundraiser... even then...
- gosub100 3y agoI 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 )
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- greggsy 3y agoI highly doubt the owners didn’t notice a power meter being removed. The theft angle is a bit hard to believe.
- andyjohnson0 3y agoAnyone care to summarise the back story to this?
- mkl 3y agohttps://www.al.com/news/2024/02/someone-stole-a-jasper-radio-stations-200-foot-tower-owner-says.html https://www.al.com/news/2024/02/someone-stole-a-jasper-radio..., big discussion 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302045 Radio station owner says transmitting tower was stolen, as if it had disappeared overnight. Related story about things not adding up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39397568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39397568
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoThis is one of those stories that every single police procedural show on TV/streaming will have some version of in the next production cycle.
- xattt 3y agoLaw & Order: Spectrum Management and Telecommunications Division
- AnarchismIsCool 3y agoThis would just be people sitting in front of screens screaming techno-babble for the entire episode...so basically 24?
- rainbowzootsuit 3y agoDual wielding keyboards too.
- nimbius 3y agoAs 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?
- lando2319 3y agoSo supposedly a radio tower was stolen, causing a sister station to have to shut down as well But this link suggests maybe the tower's been missing for some time
- greggsy 3y agoStolen, or deliberately scrapped by the owners? It’s entirely possible they legitimately thought that the FCC wouldn’t care about the AM requirement in their license. The owners would almost certainly know that the thing went offline. They would have a maintenance schedule, and power bills to pay.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoIs 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?
- kmbfjr 3y agoIt isn’t a sister station, it is a translator station. If it were a sister FM, it could stay on the air.
- sitkack 3y agoIt is hard to imagine the FCC wouldn’t notice that there was no signal on that AM station for that amount of time, or the owner, or the power company. Everything about the story is weird.
- lutoma 3y agoThe owner probably noticed but didn't care. Presumably the only reason they still had it was because they were legally required to so they could keep operating on FM. And I doubt the FCC is constantly monitoring any random AM station if nobody complains.
- sitkack 3y agoThey definitely spot signals that shoudn't be there, even AM radio stations. I think no one at the FCC cared, the broadcaster knew the tower was gone and also didn't care since their main concern was apparently running the FM station. > Elmore explained that they were alerted to the theft on Friday when a bush hog crew arrived at the WJLX tower site in Jasper to clean up the property, only to find it completely cleared out by the thieves. You don't get alerted that the tower and the transmitter are gone by bush crew. You get alerted by the signal being gone. He should have been paged 2 seconds after the signal stopped. I still don't buy it.
- quesera 3y agoThe 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gmiller123456 3y agoHere's a video where two guys visit the site of where the antenna was supposed to be. Vegitation overgrowth of the remains suggest it's been at least one growing season since it was removed. Looks like it was inopperational well before that. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=78PvlGCqM84 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=78PvlGCqM84
- lisper 3y agoUnedited version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqIysr3o_vY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqIysr3o_vY But apparently they went to the wrong site. According to [1], the WJLX tower was next to another tower (for WIXI) which is still standing, but that second tower is not visible anywhere in the video. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39413347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39413347
- RF_Enthusiast 3y agoThe WIXI site, 0.35 miles away, has a white building [1] [2] [3]. One-third of a mile distance in a forested area is a reasonable distance to not see the WIXI tower from the ground. I'm pretty sure the YouTube video is at the correct location. It's clearly not at WIXI. [1] WIXI: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CM1MwZBCDnCQgtUH7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/CM1MwZBCDnCQgtUH7 [2] WIXI zoomable map: https://fccdata.org/?facid=&call=WIXI https://fccdata.org/?facid=&call=WIXI [3] WJLX zoomable map: https://fccdata.org/?facid=&call=wjlx https://fccdata.org/?facid=&call=wjlx Edit to add: I went through every AM station listed at https://fccdata.org/?lang=en&latd=33.8549&lond=87.2707 https://fccdata.org/?lang=en&latd=33.8549&lond=87.2707 and there are no other AM stations in that region.
- lisper 3y ago> 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?
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- js2 3y agoEdit: wrong tower per reply from js2wjlxam. Correct tower (satellite view): https://maps.app.goo.gl/mf1D1Cdfy9Pz6wjp7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/mf1D1Cdfy9Pz6wjp7 The one I've linked below is: https://maps.app.goo.gl/7XRGG5cpHqixVkPB9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/7XRGG5cpHqixVkPB9 --- Original comment: Here's the best street view of it I've found from when it was still standing in June 2022. At that time it seems to be in pretty good shape: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CbCZSEcHn6NJnP649 https://maps.app.goo.gl/CbCZSEcHn6NJnP649 It looks to me like the power pole in this view is also the tower's source of power.
- js2wjlxam 3y agoThat is not the correct tower. See https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1aqc0pq/how_one_man_stole_the_wjlx_radio_tower_undetected/kqe6hfg/ https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1aqc0pq/how_one_man...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thih9 3y agoWhen I read “wrong tower” at the top, I thought the submission was about the wrong tower. It took me a while to figure out that only the link later in the parent’s comment is wrong.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoSupposedly not insurance fraud but perhaps it's crisis fraud or crowdfunding fraud for a tiny radio station that cannot sustain itself economically.
- mikey_p 3y agoCalled this as being fishy back when it first came up on HN, and ended up getting downvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39328406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39328406
- hobobaggins 3y agoAssuming 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.)
- mrmanner 3y agoIf a tower falls in the forest, but no one heard its broadcast…
- mink12345 3y ago[flagged]
- daniel-cussen 3y ago[dead]
- randomcarbloke 3y agosome 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.
- TXengineer 3y ago[dead]
- TXengineer 3y ago[dead]