Thieves Steal 200ft Tower From Alabama Radio Station - Slashdot
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Thieves Steal 200ft Tower From Alabama Radio Station
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Thieves Steal 200ft Tower From Alabama Radio Station (theguardian.com) 85
Posted by BeauHD
on Thursday February 08, 2024 @05:00PM from the you-don't-hear-that-everyday dept.Elmore said the theft was first discovered last week by a landscaping crew that regularly manages the area nearby the tower, WBRC reported. "They called me and said the tower was gone. And I said, 'What do you mean, the tower is gone?'" Elmore said. The radio tower was previously located in a wooded area, behind a local poultry plant. Elmore said that thieves had cut the tower's wires and somehow removed it. Thieves also stole the station's AM transmitter from a nearby building.
For the small radio station, the theft has had a significant impact. Elmore said the station's property was not insured. Replacing the tower could cost the station anywhere between $100,000 to $150,000, which is "more money than we have," Elmore said. The FCC also notified WJLX on Thursday morning that the station would have to go off the air because of the theft. While WJLX still has its FM transmitter and tower, it is not allowed to operate its FM transmitter while the AM station is off the air. "I had a guy from Virginia call yesterday and say, 'You know, I think a helicopter grabbed [the tower],'" Elmore said. He's hoping that surveillance video from the nearby poultry plant or witnesses nearby can help figure out who stole the station's tower.
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> The FCC also notified WJLX on Thursday morning that the station would have to go off the air because of the theft.
The feds stepping in to help at every opportunity.
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by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Thursday February 08, 2024 @05:56PM (#64226022)
> The FCC also notified WJLX on Thursday morning that the station would have to go off the air because of the theft.
The feds stepping in to help at every opportunity.
It's not the FCC's job to assist radio stations with their equipment. Their job is to monitor the allocation of radio waves and ensure people are following the rules.
It sucks that Bubba and friends needed some cash and took the tower, but that is not in the realm of the FCC.
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by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Thursday February 08, 2024 @06:28PM (#64226136)
Jamal and friends, get it right.
Nope, Bubba. They have the equipment to do this. Guaranteed.
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Yup. I took a look at the place on Google street view. The antenna was tucked in down a gravel road through the woods behind a chicken processing plant. Chain link fence all around the factory. Cinder block and steel buildings with dozens of long haul trucks parked in the lots. Has a guard house too, but nobody sitting in the booth. You just know that Bubba and his kin folk have all the equipment you'd need to take down that tower piece by piece. They probably just borrowed what they needed from the f
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It does seem strange though that they have a licensed transmitter but can't use it because their OTHER licensed transmitter is missing...
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> The FCC also notified WJLX on Thursday morning that the station would have to go off the air because of the theft.
The feds stepping in to help at every opportunity.
The FM station, W268BM, is officially just a translator of the AM station, which means it rebroadcasts the AM feed on FM. It isn't legally licensed to operate as a standalone radio station. So as much as it sucks, the FCC is following the law here.
Apparently, this station also has a checkered history [wikipedia.org] including being sold repeatedly (recently), shutdowns because of inadequate maintenance on the AM tower, etc.
FM translators of AM stations get converted to standalone stations (with a corresponding shutdown of the original AM station) all the time, so I'm surprised the FCC didn't approve a conversion, but maybe there are good reasons for that (or maybe they filed the wrong paperwork).
Either way, this seems a little sus, but it is Alabama we're talking about, so...:-D
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by PPH ( 736903 ) on Thursday February 08, 2024 @06:48PM (#64226200)
The FM station, W268BM, is officially just a translator of the AM station,
No problem. How powerful does the AM station have to be? Just pick up a 50 Watt AM transmitter and go back on the air.
It's how the Jesus channels get "must carry" cable TV coverage. Minimum power transmitter and the cable companies have to carry them.
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The strength of the AM transmitter would be within the license. They would have to output between X and Y watts of power, and report their coverage area on a regular basis. The transmitter itself is tied to a tower and would have the be at Z feet as well, making this an even harder "quick fix".
Transmitters take a long time to source. Probably a good half of the ones in service today are running on repaired or backup equipment.
Towers take a long time to permit and build. Months, if not years. And even th
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This sounds like the toothbrush botnet story https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]. Tomorrow we are going to find out there is no stolen tower.
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Clearly it's a practice run for stealing the Eiffel Tower, which is only 5x taller.
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More to the point, what scrap yard will take a big tower, intact and potentially hanging from a helicopter, and without question?
Nothing like reinforcing that mafia stereotype about waste disposal.
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Renting the helicopter will cost more than the tower is worth
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Most privately owned helicopters don't have the payload capacity to carry more than a few feet of a steel tower.
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Officer: So... Jimmy... I cant help but notice you just got yourself a new 200ft radio antenna in your yard that looks suspiciously like the one that mysteriously vanished from the local radio station...
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Yes. Scrap yards are usually run by moderately high functioning scoff laws that deal in all kinds of stolen metal.
Thinking about this, it's not that astonishing. A couple battery operated grinders to cut the guy lines, knock it over, separate the sections and load it on a bit flag trailer.
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I think it was that mean R.J. Fletcher.
He managed to get his non-affiliated competition off the air. this time.-
And here I was thinking it was just Harvey Bilchik having an unlucky run at the horse track again. Since the station equipment wasn't insured he had to resort to desperate measures for fast cash.
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There’s nothing quite like a good conspiracy about aliens traveling across the universe, to find themselves threatened and attacking an AM radio tower.
Even we humans barely give a shit at this point.
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Pretty sure it was citizens.
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You just KNOW Taylor Swift was involved!
(ducks)
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Sacre Bleu! The martians are destroying the Eiffel Tower!
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This wasn't an act of god. Did they just not have an insurance policy for their vital infrastructure?
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In their defense, declining the theft rider probably seemed like a solid decision at the time.
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I'm sure it was phenomenally inexpensive.
The whole thing about stealing it with a helicopter sounds fishy. A 200' tower would be fairly heavy, beyond the capabilities of most helicopters.
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You'd be surprised.
40' tower is 125lb of Aluminum
72' steel tower is 1000lb
200' towers vary in weight from 6,000 to 8,000 lbs. It gets exponential as you go taller because of physics, but most helicopter can lift 4 ton-
In theory, maybe, but in practice, short towers often weigh more per foot than tall towers, because they're often built more like the Eiffel Tower with fewer guy wires, whereas taller towers are usually straight vertical towers with guy wires.
And that's actually about the point where it stops making sense to use a pyramid-shaped tower. Above about 250 feet or so, the weight actually goes down.
To build a 500-foot tower you might use 50 of these 10-foot sections [ispsupplies.com] at a weight of 17.5 pounds per foot, or 8,750
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Holy shit, I always thought people were saying "guide-wires" not "guy-wires" ; TIL.
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Guide wires are a different thing, used to guide something along a path. Guy wires are stressed wires supplying lateral stability to a structure.
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I wonder if whomever lends them the capital for a new tower is going to require they carry insurance on it.
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It’s a mostly worthless structure that has probably stood in place for decades.
Given corporate insurance costs, would you really look to insure something that is basically worthless outside of a scrap yard? I mean, if you were being honest about it?
Doesn’t surprise me at all. No act of God proved harmful to that point.
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Should you insure something that could come down suddenly in a bad wind storm and A. not be usable, B. destroy one of your buildings, and C. kill people? Yeah. That's part of the cost of staying in business.
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Theft insurance for this is probably trivial. Liability probably somewhat more. And damage likely the most costly of all. With many automobile insurance policies, for instance, you can separate those coverages, but I'm not sure if that is available for things like this or if it is an all or nothing choice.
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The only time insurance would be considered “trivial” is if it’s proven trivial to make a claim and receive prompt compensation.
Let me know if you find an insurance company that behaves that way. Never seen or heard of one myself.
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Or D. Consider how often that has ever happened in the history of radio towers, and insure according to risk and reality.
No matter how much insurance you have, it’s never enough to mitigate all risk, so setting a goal of cover EVERY scenario is going to get prohibitively expensive.
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You don't insure it based on its value to someone else. You insure it based on it's value to you.
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Well, cost would be more accurate. Replacement cost in this case. The material scrap value might be a few hundred dollars. But it's going to take a lot of work (labor, $$) to set that thing up.
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Nope. From TFA:
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That's one part that seems seriously sus. You can buy a new 250-foot cellular tower [3starinc.com] for a little over $16k, and AM towers aren't that different cost-wise, at least for the tower part. Labor can't possibly be 90% of the installation cost. It's not exactly rocket science. You pretty much have somebody climb up the thing with a safety harness, attach a hoist, pull the next segment up alongside the previous one, then bolt it on, attaching guy wires at the appropriate spots.
More realistic estimates [broadcaste...ering.info] are O($12
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The cost estimate could also be a WAG by somebody because they haven't put out the bid requests yet.
Or the cost is for "priority" service, not next year.
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A 1kW AM transmitter will cost you ~$10k, I think. That's not exactly a high-power station.:-) However, that could maybe be the cost of replacing everything that got stolen, wires that got cut, etc., plus having engineers test its output at various places nearby and verify that it meets the ERP requirements, etc. I still wouldn't think it would be that high, but I've never put one in from scratch before, so I could be wrong.:-)
The bigger problem is that it takes a long time to get a replacement transmi
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I'll note that more than just the antenna was stolen.
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... stole the station's AM transmitter...
A return to pirate radio of the 1960s.
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Christian Slater, is that you?
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When you start looking at the weight of one of these towers a helicopter seems unlikely. They are heaving enough that you need a big expensive hard to find helicopter and a pilot to fly it.
Looking at the weight it also appears that a scrapper would need to be very skilled and this would take some time to steal.
And it is not going to happen fast enough that someone does not notice the AM station is offline and goes to see what broken and finds the tower in the process of being stolen.
So this story smells funny.
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Well, it was out in the woods. Very patient meth heads.
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When i was in university, someone stole a very large generator from outside of their buildings. Large enough that it would have required a oversize load truck and two cranes to take it. I'm not sure they ever recovered it, but it was also before the era of everything being recorded.
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The large Mormon cathedral for the Puget Sound region is across the valley from our house. When it was built they put a golden statue of their angel Moroni on top of it. Some years later (in the '80s IIRC) a crew arrived and put up scaffold with a work order from Salt Lake to take down Moroni to clean him. A few weeks later the cathedral queried Salt Lake as to when the statue would be return and reinstalled, only to find that headquarters had no idea what they were talking about.
The current Moroni is on
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And it is not going to happen fast enough that someone does not notice the AM station is offline and goes to see what broken and finds the tower in the process of being stolen.
This is an AM station in rural Alabama we're talking about here. All five of their listeners were probably in bed when their tower was stolen.
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And it is not going to happen fast enough that someone does not notice the AM station is offline and goes to see what broken and finds the tower in the process of being stolen.
AM stations often have "operating hours" because their signals can exceed their allocated footprint at night, for example. Many AM stations simply have to shut down at night because propagation is such that there will be a more powerful station that will overlap in the region.
So this results in smaller AM stations going off the air ov
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Play stupid games....
Note: That also means if the tower or any portion of it fell in bad weather, you know, like the tornados that are becoming more common in the South, the station wouldn't have any coverage for injuries/damage to others.
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There's a difference between property insurance and liability insurance, and you're not obligated to take property coverage to get liability coverage.
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Clearly the thieves were planning to start their own conservative talk radio station, Cajun music station, or AM religious network.
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This sounds like the beginning of a James Bond movie. Either that or just an Auburn fan wanting to screw with a Bama fan.
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Is anyone surprised? The price of metals is generally going up, while punishment for thieves is generally going down (because prisons bad or something). Yes, this is true even in the red states. Meanwhile in Europe, theft of electric wires from railways has reached an all-time high.
If the punishment doesn't deter, thieves get more and more emboldened, to the point of selling a frickin' 200ft broadcast tower. Simple as that.-
*stealing not selling (though they most likely did it to sell the metal).
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I remember reading articles about thieves in Russia stealing entire bridges, so you have a point there...
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You'd never see a headline like this in Canada.
No, it would be "Thieves Steal 61m Tower from Quebec Radio Station"
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Alberta is the Canadian equivalent.
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Is there a fraternity house in the general vicinity?
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I agree this story is suspicious, but playing along for now........what do they mean landscapers noticed it was missing?
Like no one called in and said 'hey, there's no AM broadcast'?
Sounds like a case of 'no one was even listening anyway'. Hopefully the thieves make better use of it!
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It sounds like everyone listens on FM, and they've been simulcasting on AM only out of obligation to their licensing agreement.
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I agree this story is suspicious, but playing along for now........what do they mean landscapers noticed it was missing?
Like no one called in and said 'hey, there's no AM broadcast'?
Sounds like a case of 'no one was even listening anyway'. Hopefully the thieves make better use of it!
"No one was even listening" would also have to include the DJ, the chief engineer, the owner, or whoever was the operator at the time.
I've worked at two radio stations in my life, and in both cases there was monitoring equipmen
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Unless the scope of ruralism in Alabama is way more than I imagine. Which is a possibility...
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If they had any listeners wouldn't someone have called to ask why the station is off line?
Even the transmitter monitoring equipment would be reporting an error, wouldn't it? Oh they also stole the transmitter; smells like an inside job.
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