It is hard to imagine the FCC wouldn’t notice that there was no signal on that AM station for that amount of time, or the owner, or the power company.
Everything about the story is weird.
Everything about the story is weird.
And I doubt the FCC is constantly monitoring any random AM station if nobody complains.
I think no one at the FCC cared, the broadcaster knew the tower was gone and also didn't care since their main concern was apparently running the FM station.
> Elmore explained that they were alerted to the theft on Friday when a bush hog crew arrived at the WJLX tower site in Jasper to clean up the property, only to find it completely cleared out by the thieves.
You don't get alerted that the tower and the transmitter are gone by bush crew. You get alerted by the signal being gone. He should have been paged 2 seconds after the signal stopped.
I still don't buy it.
Agreed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqIysr3o_vY is a video of some people exploring the site.
The guy ropes and fallen fences are overgrown, the electricity meter has clearly been missing for months at the very least. There's no evidence like crushed plants indicating the tower having fallen any time recently.
The station's FM license was part of an FCC scheme to improve the economics of struggling AM stations, and because the aim was to strengthen AM not replace it, the license requires them to continue broadcasting on AM.
My guess is they've been broadcasting in violation of that license for years, someone called them on it, and they had to concoct this "stolen tower" story to cover that up.
> The Jasper, Alabama, station was ordered off air by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as authorities continue to investigate how and why the heavy steel structure suddenly disappeared.
> “In all my years of being in the business, around the business, everything like that, I have never seen anything like this,” Elmore told The Post.
> “You don’t hear of a 200-foot tower being stolen,” he added.”
> While the self-proclaimed “Sound of Walker County,” still has its FM transmitter and tower, it is not allowed to operate while the AM station is off the air, according to FCC.
So, if anything, simulcasting drives listeners off the AM side and into the much better quality FM side.
If someone else wanted that AM allocation, they would have filed a complaint that the licensee was not operating, and the license would be cancelled.
It's also not typical to monitor your own signal directly. You have telemetry coming back from the transmitter site. This includes antenna VSWR which would spike if the antenna disappeared. Or no telemetry at all, if the transmitter building lost power or was raided etc.
There is zero possibility that a compliant licensee would not be aware of an antenna loss within seconds of it happening. So the question becomes what level of noncompliance this licensee was operating under. Sounds to me like they were cheating because AM transmissions are low ROI.
The operators knew. They just didn't care. Or they may not have known that the tower had been stolen and assumed the transmitter was broken and were procrastinating to fix it.
Moreover, I can't imagine anyone successfully tearing down a working antenna. My guess is the timeline went: transmitter stops working, site sits idle for a few months, thieves notice it's turned off, raid the place, station owner finally decides to do something about it, discovers they've been cleared out.
Taking down a tower requires more time and care. And tools. And it pays less for scrap, although the black market for the kind of equipment you find in a transmitter building is small and not well-capitalized.
Telemetry is cheap in the scheme of broadcast expenses.
If the station is operating on a shoestring budget, you have at least one human who cares that the revenue-generating operations (broadcast signal) are happening.
Similarly that person would notice the change in power expenses.
Even in the lowest-tech, least-compliant of stations, someone would notice an antenna and/or tower loss within a day. This reads like a case of severe neglect, almost certainly intentional, and possibly fraudulent.
Given that their license is for a FM rebrodcaster, it seems like the FM business is the one they care about more, and the AM signal was just being used as a means to an end.
My assertion though, is that there's no chance that they were unaware that the AM station was down.
The only path to plausible deniability requires extreme non-compliance, which risks fines and could even threaten their ability to hold other licenses / operate other stations.
So they're in trouble either way, but this story of surprise is absolute crap.
I.e. purposefully don't have any monitoring, purposefully don't go to the site often etc. then only respond of someone tells you there's a problem.
I've dealt with a few contracts in the past that have stipulated that we must respond within xx hours of becoming aware of an issue, if I didn't want to run the service it would be in my interests to do everything in my power not to avoid becoming aware of any issues.
In this case, they were required to operate the AM station to keep their FM license. In addition to the usual threats to license and fines etc, they were also risking their FM license which persumably was ROI positive.
There are regulatory causes for 'xx' response times as well, outside of a contract.
The first part you brought up was willful ignorance[0] which would likely come into play with licensing, insurability, as well as tort and criminal liabilities.
I can see scrappers stealing the tower and nobody bothered to find out. I can also see scrappers stealing the tower, the station knew but since it's negative-ROI they pretended they didn't.
https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2022/07/articles/fcc-cracki...
(Dead air is actually a bigger sin than off-air. Off-air happens. Dead air should almost never happen.)
The article talks about monitoring stations who have a history of poor usage of their license. And it's not clear that "monitor" here would mean any active steps, vs just requiring the usual mandatory reporting of unscheduled, unpermitted, extended off-air events.
But the FCC does not routinely monitor for dead air or any other violations. They do respond to complaints of all kinds. In competitive markets, licensees monitor each other.
The FCC learned about the dead air because the stations themselves filed Special Temporary Authority paperwork with the FCC specifying that the station carrier was not active during that time.
So, it was not active monitoring, but passive paperwork review, triggered by the license application itself, that caused the ruling.
The FCC does not actively monitor stations in any way.
Everyone seems to think that TV stations are all on the same level of the flagships for each network. Some of them still are less than what you'd see in the movie UHF.
After they get a report, they have direction-finding equipment that they are very good at using, though.
I think you're greatly overestimating the technical sophistication of this operation. I'm not saying they didn't notice sooner, but I doubt they had this sort of modern monitoring system set up. It seems like the sort of operation that has been coasting on minimal money/effort for many years.
The question remains: in what ways were they operating noncompliantly?
However there's almost zero possibility that they were unaware of their antenna loss until the brush crew showed up. Unless the theft happened overnight (some AM stations shut down at night).
Even if nothing else clued them in, a transmitter without an antenna will basically shut down, and the electric bill will go to near zero.
In light of that, it's possible they had no functional telemetry or nobody was paying attention to it, and therefore, it's plausible they really didn't notice when the antenna went missing. But if I were the feds, I would be investigating the possibility that the operators themselves sold the antenna for scrap...
This might sound far-fetched to many, but it's a real thing. Galvanized steel has a decent scrap value. Taking down a tower is not a trivial project, but it happens.
I was responsible for a 800-ft tower in a past life, and a pager, a 4x4 truck, and a gun were considered required equipment. I opted for the first two, but wasn't prepared to commit to the responsibilities of the third.
The most common theft scenario was an equipment smash-and-grab. But tower thefts were not unheard of.
US? I'm guessing you mean smaller towers like ~50' used for local links, utility radios, etc. Or do you mean like 75' or 150'+? Do people grab commercial towers?
Small towers are much easier, but big towers get hit sometimes too. Usually when they are in a transitioning period (new, major maintenance, decomm) because the bigger the tower, typically the more antennas are on it, and the more parties who will notice it's disappearance quickly.
47 CFR § 73.1400(b) permits operation with “a self-monitoring or ATS-monitored and controlled transmission system that, in lieu of contacting a person designated by the licensee, automatically takes the station off the air within three hours of any technical malfunction which is capable of causing interference” (emphasis added).
This doesn’t change the licensee’s basic responsibility “for assuring that at all times the station operates [...] in accordance with the terms of the station authorization,” of course.
> in what ways were they operating noncompliantly?
If the station was off the air and the licensee didn’t notify the FCC within 10 days and seek a silent STA within 30 days, that would violate 47 CFR § 73.1740(a)(4).
So this licensee's best claim is that they had some kind of major equipment failure, their dead mans switch worked and took them off-air, and someone jumped on the opportunity to take down a non-energized radiator tower and steal their equipment.
It is still unbelievable of course! The best time to find someone at a remote transmitter site is when the tower has recently gone dark. And it does not address the gap between failure and awareness/reporting.
Thanks also for the cite to the notification requirement timelines.
Have you ever worked for a smaller company? Compliance is a thing you do on paper, that has very little to do with the real world.
Nor for a company that didn't have some level of fear of being fined by the FCC for non-compliance.
Things may be different in small-market rural!
But the economics of "not knowing" that your station is off-air are impossible.
Big companies have their own distinct ways, true. They have massive resources to deploy against regulation and oversight. By forestalling accountability or insuring it results in disproportionately small fines, they can insure non-compliance is strongly profitable. This satisfies the interests that matter most to a public corp, execs and investors.
> Big companies can't ... directly violate health&safety regulations, creating health risk for customers, without fear of consequences.
This is a bold declaration.
The percentage of execs who are convicted - or even tried (for crimes that would gain most of us a harsh penalty) is so low it's striking when it happens.
When you have corporate-sized resources (that can outweigh the even the government's) to prevent accountability, those odds tend to be strongly in your favor.
Some modern listeners don't even know what AM stations are.
AM has better propagation (lower frequency), but inherently more noise (amplitude modulated).
You could also trilaterate the physical source of each frequency using TDoA, since all Kiwi samples are time-tagged with the integrated also-software-defined GPS receiver.
Generate alerts if a licensed-stationary source appears to move, etc..?
Track high-power CB abusers?
The sky's the limit, just someone has to care, and be good with software, and both of those things have to overlap in the same person.
Maybe the typical approach of having flaky monitoring and after enough time, you simply chalk it up to "well, seems the monitoring is offline again, but no one is complaining so probably the thing still works"?
Alternatively, the owner did notice it was missing, but reporting it as missing would also mean they have to shut down FM service, so they left it until someone complained/noticed.
I’m sure radio operators know this one weird trick to confirm that theory: Turn on your AM car radio.
The station owner likely knew within a few hours to a few days that the tower went offline. At the very least the power bill would have been very low or non-existent that month which would make it pretty obvious. And to your point they could tune their FM radio to their station frequency and see if it works.
The FCC is a federal organization. I doubt they have an office in Jasper Alabama. So the FCC monitoring is the one in question here. Because as soon as the FCC notices the AM station is down, then the FM translation (which is what the station was really marketed around and gaining its viewership from) is shut down. Which means the station owner is out of a job. The FCC's monitoring is probably not realtime and I could see someone at the FCC getting an alert that this AM station in Jasper Alabama is down and they do think to themselves the monitoring is bad or flaky and don't immediately panic. The FCC isn't going to be able to just tune their radio to the AM station to check since they aren't in range of the station.
I don't really get the regulatory aspect, but they're seemingly only operating this AM station as some sort of stipulation for their FM license? If that's true, why do people care? Why does the FCC care?
Check out this video, they go into what operations look like at a probably similar but better run commercial AM radio tower. Still probably a lot of the same concepts. There's a cool clip of them arcing off the tower to ground and you can hear the audio through the plasma.
And yeah, I feel ya, the hobby is often filled crusty old get off my lawn kind of people. There's still a lot of nice people to meet on the air as well, and hopefully with the FCC rethinking rules about digital operations on ham bands it could open up to some more interesting stuff soon. I've had a good bit of fun and learned a good bit getting a tech, probably going to get my general soon and take advantage of this solar cycle. Now's the time to get into the hobby instead of waiting a few years.
73
I looked into getting my technician's license at a few points over the years remembering how much fun I had listening to my dad's friend talk to folks from across the world on his capable home rig. If you ask someone in the amateur radio scene what it's like, they'll paint a utopian picture of community bonding around a shared passion.
... But man, if that's true, y'all sure hide it well behind an incredibly frosty exterior.
Every few years I'll lurk on radio forums and social media to get a sense of the community-- as I do with many other current/potential hobbies-- and it reveals a punitive, cantankerous, spiteful, and patronizing stance towards anyone that isn't already 'in the club.' I've been using the net since about 1993 and have seen a whole lot of toxic communities in my life, but man... the online ham communities I've seen were bad. Then I see people in them blaming poor character among younger generations for not taking the torch. Yeah... sure. That's it, bud. Surely it has nothing to do with the people in your forum that race to belittle someone asking to be pointed in the right direction. And heaven help them if they have a feminine sounding username. It's like a perpetual feedback loop of the angry nerd crowd dynamic that's slowly becoming less acceptable in tech culture as the decades pass.
> THE FCC IS NOT ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR NEW FM COMMERCIAL BROADCAST STATIONS AT THE PRESENT TIME.
Even if they were, your application just puts the allocation up for the next auction. I don't think the FCC has held an auction in a long time.
Is it because of pointless administrative gridlock? If so, good on them for finding a way to get around some bureaucrat's unwillingness to wield their approval stamp.
Is it because of some technical reason? Ok, bummer, but that's totally different. If it's someone's bottom line vs a public resource, that's that... but I get the sense the FCC would have said that explicitly, no?
Just because you have a license doesn't mean you have to use it.
> The radio station had an FCC license that required they operate an AM transmitter. Now that the FCC has found out that they are not broadcasting on AM, the station is not allowed to continue on FM.
This (from the other thread) seems to be the pertinent part.
It's sort of tenuous, although not wrong. Off-air is a better state than dead air.
But commercial program directors are neurotic beasts. And listeners can definitely be fickle!
One story I've heard is that PDs obsess over car listeners, who are punching "seek" (or a different preset) at the slightest provocation. They believed that a couple-second silent gap in a song would lose X listeners. They might have even had data to back it up.
I've seen song gaps trimmed, or filled with a quick station ID. Philistines!
This is completely untrue for broadcast licenses.
An operator is allocated radio spectrum so stands to reason it’s use-it-or-lose-it.
Ues the FCC cares and yes they must use it, when using the FM teansmitter.
The FCC most certainly should be monitoring these compliance requirements. I suspect someone at the FCC noticed they weren't transmitting, asked, then the owner claimed the just found out.. someone stole the tower!
They do not have the resources or the coverage to monitor broadcasters.
One thing we need to realize, that as computing types, we think of monitoring differently.
Monitoring need not be real time. A yearly inspection can be done. Quarterly. Audits.
Even grocery stores don't get daily or even weekly health inpections.
Remote broadcast transmitter monitoring is explicitly real-time. Or it's non-compliant and subject to fines and license revocation.
I think its possible that they only send someone out once a year to check for active frequencies. When they see a problem (AM 1259 is missing) then they send out the brush crew.
Point being, I highly doubt that realtime monitoring exists everywhere. The owner of this station probably banked on the fact that no one's watching Jasper Alabama that closely. When someone at the FCC gets their annual paperwork about this station, they probably just do a cursory check on it and push it through, not putting a lot of time or energy into this tiny station.
The station has an FCC-mandated responsibility for real-time and responsive monitoring of their transmitters.
Um, what? Please, show me where the license agreement says this.