I have seen way too many small market operations and AM only stations that were run by crooks and con men. I posted over on another reflector that having a criminal background can be a determent in some circles but in Broadcasting its viewed
as a plus. My speculation is that the first national story about the station WJLX in Alabama is a load of crap and the owner sold off all the junk at the AM site to get out of having to pay rent on the land and the electric bill, there only interest in being
able to keep the FM translator on the air at 250 watts and continue to make money that way until the FCC came back and said that you cannot run a translator unless your original station your translating is on the air. They are currently running a go fund me
campaign and wonder where that money will go? Mixed scrap meatal, that’s what used galvanized tower is worth about $3 per hundred pounds at this time so you would get about $105 for a 3500 pounds of junk tower, would be a lot of work to cut down, cut into
sections and transport all for just $100?
You may think that my attitude is a bit over the top but I worked for Cheap Channel Radio for around twenty years before they eliminated all transmitter engineering positions and maintained over a dozen AM and FM sites. Couple years before
I left the company in a effort to save a dollar they stopped cutting grass at all the transmitter sites and at the AM sites within three or four years they were so overgrown that you were not able to have access to the buildings or tower bases due to the overgrowth.
Had one 5 kW AM site that the pattern was not able to change due to stuck contactors but you were not able to get to the buildings so for years that has been running in Daytime pattern only. Had another AM site up in Delaware where the trees had grown into
the power lines going to the transmitter building and failed. The utility refused to repair it until they cleared the trees and in that case the director of engineering personally dragged two huge propane bottles to the site every day so it would stay on the
air on the backup generator. They burnt out two 10kW generators before the market manager would pay to get the trees removed.
I have been away from the company for maybe five or six years now and was just told about one of the AM stations that I was responsible for where a tree grew up thru a guy point and brought its tower down, and remember Cheap Channel is
one of the better companies in the business.
In the last ten years the FCC has been giving out a lot of translator licenses, they once had a requirement where you had to pick up the signal off air but eliminated that years ago so that’s why you have the plethora of religious translators
in operation today, the new deal is you can build FM translators within your AM stations service contour so lots of people including a lot of hacks and worse developed a whole new interest in AM because they saw that as a way to get on FM so many old useless
AM properties now had some perceived new value. Don’t know anything about the station in the new story but if you go to the station in the first story website you will see they do everything they can to make you think they are a FM station and never mention
that they are a AM station. Suppose I can be wrong after all have no direct knowledge of both stories but do have a little background in the broadcasting world.
There you go, more then you ever wanted to know about AM Radio!
Ray F/KA3EKH
From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
On Behalf Of [email protected]
Sent: Friday, February 16, 2024 1:15 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [MRCA] Another loss for AM radio.
Missing in Alabama: A Radio Tower, and ‘The Sound of Walker County’
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/us/alabama-radio-tower-stolen.html?unlocked_article_code=1.V00.1lfp.uyGSFS4kK6ix&smid=nytcore-android-share
Did they do it for the scrap?
Mike N2MS