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200-foot AM radio tower disappears, halting Alabama station broadcast | "There's wires everywhere, and it's gone." (arstechnica.com)

submitted 9 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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200-foot AM radio tower disappears, halting Alabama station broadcast | "There's wires everywhere, and it's gone."::"There's wires everywhere, and it's gone."

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[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 14 points 9 months ago

So from reading the article, it seems that it wasn't just the tower taken, but also the transmitter. Which makes a little more sense; you don't want to be the thing that detaches an AM broadcast antenna from its feed line while it's on the air. They often transmit with kilowatts or megawatts of power, and often the tower structure itself IS the antenna, or half of it.

I'd be curious if there was a political motivation. This happening in Alabama, was someone scheduled to say some things that aren't extremely racist or something?

The article states that the missing property has a value of ~$200,000, but I imagine that's in the form of an intact radio transmitter and tower; as scrap metal it's probably worth a small fraction of that, and what scrapyard is going to accept a broadcast tower without any questions?

Also:

While the tower remains MIA, WJLX remains off the air. The radio station asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow it to keep broadcasting its FM station even though its AM station is off the air, but the FCC denied the request on Thursday, the station said, since the FCC doesn't allow FM translators to run without the AM station also being on air. The FM station is now only available online.

What? Why?