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Comment by thih9 | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone here familiar with structures like these? Do you have any theories how this could have happened?

Two to four people showed up in a pickup pulling a flatbed trailer, armed with battery powered metal saws and a dream. The rest should be self-explanatory.

You could rent all of the equipment for a few hundred dollars: a 3/4 or 1-ton truck, a 30-40’ flatbed trailer, and a few portabands/angle grinders.

Hi-vis vests and hard hats also lend an air of legitimacy.

Hi-vis vests and hard hats at night are still super suspicious. No legit crew would do this kind of thing at night.

Is there any reason to believe it was done at night? It does not sound like they have any idea when it disappeared, or how long it was gone before they noticed.

The tower seems to be in a relatively remote field, and the tower seems pretty small (judging from [1]). Cut it down and in to pieces with a few battery-powered grinders, put in a van or two (or a small truck), and off you go. I suspect this may be easier than it appears at first sight.

[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/08/us/stolen-transmitter-rad...

How realistic is the theory in the article regarding it being picked up by a helicopter? I don't know how much a tower like that could weight, nor how much a typical helicopter that a private individual has access to could lift.

But if they'd be able to collect a significant value after cutting it down into pieces somewhere else and sell the pieces, maybe it makes sense (from the thief's perspective) to helicopter away the tower after detaching it from the ground.

It's a small tower, but I'd think it'd probably still weighs a couple thousand pounds. I could be way off there and it's smaller than it looks in the CNN photo, but you're likely looking at using a construction helicopter and needing experienced people capable of rigging the tower and actually lifting it without killing everybody.

My guess is that they just dropped it and chopped it up. A helicopter seems ridiculously over-the-top and cartoonish for a couple hundred bucks in scrap metal value you'd gain from the theft. You'd waste more than that in just fuel for the helicopter.

Plus it would have to be a $100M military super stealth chopper to do a theft in the night, and would probably also have to be operated by that same military to force all the air traffic infrastructure to look the other way and see nothing.

I think we have our answer. Obviously that station was spreading the wrong ideas to the public, and now they are not.

Why would it have to be stealthy? Even if they did it in broad daylight, announcing their presence with a loudspeaker, "We are taking this tower." Would I, a random bystander care? For all I know, they were contracted by the owner.

Definitively someone else's problem.

you can look up historical data about what aircraft were where at what time.

As long as the ADS-B transponder is on, yeah. I'm guessing if you're about to do a short flight to hijack a radio tower, you might want to turn that off.

I don't think the helicopter was meant to be a real suggestion, just relaying an example of some of the calls and emails they've received. I think it was meant to sound silly but just show that people are interested, including people with no real idea.

All in all, the physical theft looks almost trivial to me going by the pictures of the actual site.

What mystifies me is how it went unnoticed at the electrical level, that a landscaper had to tell them.

The location is remote and unmanned, but the station must know instantly when anything at all changes even slightly about the transmitter or antenna.

Not because of webcams or anything like that either.

The connections from the signal source to the transmitter and from the transmitter to the antenna are not just one-way and blind. Any change at the load directly and instantly affects the source.

I mean obviously I must be wrong about that somewhere along the way.

I actually had a ham licence but back in the 80s and I was only 11 or so. So my understanding is both educated and not.

I once worked at a company that put telemetry equipment out in the field. At a planning meeting for one project, some of the project's locations were not very accessible, i.e. one was at the top of a cliff. Someone made the flip remark about using a helicopter. The manager, who was an ex-seal, checked into it, and found they could afford it if they were strict about the flying-time, and that's what they used. The former manager, who had gotten the project for the company, would have had everyone using pack-mules, because he liked recreational backpacking.

... and Jeff Geerling's dad confirms, NO WAY this happened without the head end knowing instantly, and not just because listeners will call in. And also, even as dinky as it looks in the pics, he finds it very hard to imagine how it could be moved in a night. The plot thickens a little.

I once got a quote to sling a 1500 lb load 5 miles from an airport to a remote area. $10,000.

> The tower seems to be in a relatively remote field

you pretty much just described every single tower site.

Kinda but some are more remote then others. Some are in a field next to a neighborhood and shooping center and some are surrounded my 100's of acres of crops.

Theft like this is suprisingly common, usually everybody assumes it's people doing their job.

Just wear a yellow reflective jacket and don't look around yourself nervously and you could steal the sign from the Police station.

and much of rural america is increasingly depopulated. not only would nobody notice, there is nobody there to notice.

One of the theories I'm seeing is that the owner dismantled the item because they didn't want to maintain the AM station, just their FM translator. The alleged theft is just a cover store to cover their actions.

The AM station was fairly small at 1KW, and only had a 200 foot tower which is also rather small. Some folks looking into it found public records from the FCC showing that the owner has be fined or found to be out of compliance for only using the FM translator with the AM station off air in the past, so this points to possible motivation.

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