Anyone care to summarise the back story to this?
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
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?
You tell your insurance company a bogus story, you get in trouble.
You put out a bogus sob story and a link to GoFundMe, you maybe don't.
Muprhy’s Law strikes again!
He then put up a gofundme.
He apparently had no monitoring of any kind. Nobody in town knows nothin' (nobody noticed the AM broadcast going away, and nobody noticed trucks hauling out tons upon tons of metal etc), scrap dealers (who are clearly the most ethical, honest sort) know nothin', the tower would not have sufficient value to justify such a brazen theft as it's not copper. Broadcast techs/operators who kinda all know each other, also know nothing and are calling the situation questionable to outright bullshit depending on how polite they are.
Geerling and his dad are erring very much on the polite-but-this-doesn't-add-up side which is responsible. I their video they also share photos of them doing a planned takedown of a tower that took weeks/months and still went a bit 'sideways' and left a clear channel of damaged trees where it fell.
The situation is muddied by some young/dumb youtuber going to the wrong site where there is another abandoned tower site, as well as the correct site having two transmitters/towers on it until the AM station's tower was taken down.
I think there's also at least one video a few years old of someone parked at the site with their radio tuned to the AM frequency, getting nothing.
From the comments on one of the videos:
====
@ianlawrence4993 22 minutes ago Thank you for the video. It really is crazy how most large news organizations are failing to ask basic questions about this story and keep falling for Elmore’s dog and pony show.
From Google Street View images, it appears that the tower has been dismantled (or at least mostly dismantled) for around a year or so. All of these photos were taken from basically the same location (accounting for digital zoom).
January 2022 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8067222,-87.2682012,3a,15y,3...
October 2022 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.806721,-87.2681688,3a,15y,34...
Both WJLX’s tower (dark colored) and the neighboring tower for WIXI (red and white striped) are visible.
March 2023 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8067219,-87.2682037,3a,15y,3...
January 2024 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8067226,-87.2681813,3a,15y,3...
The WIXI tower is visible but there is no sign of the darker WJLX tower.
Sometime between October 2022 and March 2023 it appears the WJLX tower was dismantled to the point that it cannot be seen on Street View.
Shout out to the folks over on the Radio Discussions forums for pointing this out first (at least to my knowledge). https://www.radiodiscussions.com/threads/wjlx-wjbe-and-werh-...
Also, from the Internet Archive it appears WJLX changed the masthead logo on their website in the middle of 2022. The old “Jasper’s Oldies” logo advertised both the 1240 AM channel and the 101.5 FM channel. The new “Voice of Walker County” logo only advertises the 101.5 FM channel.
Old Homepage April 1, 2022 https://web.archive.org/web/20220401022504/https://www.wjlx1...
New Homepage May 16, 2022
https://web.archive.org/web/20220516051909/https://www.wjlx1...
However, the thumbnail image for the GoFundMe set up by the station for a new tower is the old “Jasper’s Oldies” logo which includes the 1240 AM channel. GoFundMe page https://www.gofundme.com/f/wjlx-1240-am-tower-and-equipment-...
They have brought back the old logo to make it appear that they are an AM station when their marketing has ignored that for almost 2 years now. It seems to me that they stopped broadcasting in AM no later than 2022, and given their previous proceedings with the FCC probably much earlier than that. It is telling that in the interviews with local residents for this story, there is no clarification on whether or not they had listened to the AM channel specifically any time recently.
If you look at images of mast towers, there isn't much there. Basically a metal scaffold with the antenna at the top. If you look at this tower[1], a 85 foot tower is about 480 lbs, and the radio tower was supposedly around 200 feet tall so , it's probably less than 1200 lbs of metal. Probably a fairly large load but probably not really unusual.
1 - https://wadeantenna.com/product/85-foot-commercial-guyed-tow...
Can you expand on how you determined that they went to the wrong site? The only other AM station within many miles is WIXI [1], which is 0.35 miles away and has a white building [2], unlike the one shown in the video.
The pictures shown in the OP's link only show that there were two towers (WIXI an WJLX) and eventually one (WIXI).
One-third of a mile in a wooded area is far enough to not show in the video.
Take a look at this https://imgur.com/a/Qj9Aqaj which compares a photo issued by the radio station to the video at 16:45 https://youtu.be/bqIysr3o_vY?si=hiK5zNH_AhqiwK2w&t=1005
Are you seriously telling me those are different buildings?
I mean even if some helicopter managed to puck it up and fly off in the dead of night....you'd still see the cable hitting stuff.
Speculation but many the FCC started asking questions about the stations operational "difficulties" and he got jumpy or scared and figured the best way to deal with it was get rid of the tower and hope the press coverage drowns out any other issues he might have had.
TLDR: someone did something wrong...but we don't know who it is
I can't remember the exact name of the org but its citizens something....learned about it during OSNIT for military intelligence on the middle easy and other areas via youtube
WJLX is a radio station in Jasper Alabama. It operates a standard music+talk radio station that they brand as "WJLX 101.5". They are licensed to operate on AM 1240 frequency. But most (seemingly all... as addressed later) of their audience listen on the FM 101.5 version of the channel which is a simulcast of the AM 1240 frequency. They don't have a dedicated FM license, but are able to legally use this 101.5 FM frequency due to a loophole for old AM stations that allows them to reach FM audiences by translating the AM station on an FM frequency. This means that if the AM broadcast stops, that they immediately lose rights to broadcast on FM 101.5, which is the frequency they brand their station under and most/all their audience is. All this information is important as will be apparent soon.
The station owns an AM Radio tower for its "primary" frequency. The story goes that a brush cleaning crew was hired to clean up tall brush around the station, as is required. They showed up and found no tower there. They called the tower owner who then confirmed that the brush cleaners were at the right place. He then drove down to the site and when he got there, confirmed the tower was gone. So he then called the police who showed up and deemed that the tower must have been stolen.
As soon as the FCC heard that the tower was gone, that means the AM station isn't broadcasting which means that WJLX is no longer allowed to broadcast on the FM frequency since they are only allowed to do it as a translation of the AM, which no longer exists. The station was ordered to go offline within 24 hours of the tower being reported stolen.
The station has been operating at a loss for its entire existence and relied on public broadcasting government grants to break even. It can't afford to rebuild the tower. So it started a GoFundMe to rebuild the tower. Looking for $60k and currently has around $20k towards that goal.
Since this news broke that a 200 foot tower (2/3 the length of a football field) dissapeared without a trace, it has started getting a lot of attention. The station owner is standing by the fact that it was "stolen". Internet sleuths are trying to figure out if this is plausible. OP's link is to various Google street view images that show that the last recorded image of this tower standing was in October 2022. It shows that another streetview image in March 2023 shows the tower missing.
This means two things:
1. The tower went down between October 22 - March 23
2. The tower has been down for almost a year and was just reported stolen a few days ago
So how did the station owner not notice for a year that his tower was missing?
Some people are speculating that the stolen tower is a ruse to gain attention and sympathy to fund building a new tower. It came out recently that the owner had let the insurance on the tower lapse. So he has no way to rebuild it. He is unable to afford it and it was uninsured.
Within a day of the tower being reported missing, some nearby software developers decided to go out on a saturday and investigate the tower site to see what they found. The video is here: https://youtu.be/78PvlGCqM84?si=5II7VeKY1tv41mXL . Namely they confirmed that its been down for a long time. The video might be interesting to see the state of disrepair of the location.
So now the mystery is whether the tower was really stolen and if so, how did they do it with no one noticing? A lot of people are suggesting that the owner is manufacturing the theft story in order to gain sympathy for his GoFundMe.