Hacker News Reader

Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

They definitely spot signals that shoudn't be there, even AM radio stations.

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.

View on HN

> 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.

https://nypost.com/2024/02/11/news/alabama-radio-station-wjl...

> 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.

A major problem with this "helpful" FCC scheme is that FM sounds way way better than AM.

So, if anything, simulcasting drives listeners off the AM side and into the much better quality FM side.

The FCC does not monitor broadcasts for presence or content. They do respond to complaints (typically interference), but a missing signal creates no interference.

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.

A tiny operation like this? I doubt they had anything close to telemetry. Rather, they probably had a tech who visited the site ever couple months. Nothing in the shack/tower would have required daily maintenance. Their only realtime "telemetry" might have been when the power bill for the site was lower than normal.

Fair points, but:

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.

This charitable explanation hinges on the assumption that they want to run an AM station.

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.

You're right. They clearly did not want to run the AM station, and it was likely a negative ROI operation.

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'm not familiar with the rules here but is not caring a complaint route to a defense? It can be in many other fields.

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.

You appear to be conflating a few things. The 'contractor' timeliness of xx hours is typically stipulated in a contract as an Service Level Agreement (SLA) parameter.

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.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_ignorance

No. If you hold a license, you are obligated to operate the station at the licensed power. Not caring is not allowed.

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.

What a stupid arrangement. Why didn't they get a normal FM license and let the AM license go?

That’s a lot more expensive.

Assume the AM is a negative-ROI operation. Thus why would they care about quality? Why would there be *any* form of quality check? Any check requires effort and thus makes the ROI even more negative.

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.

Because the part of their operation that presumably is ROI-positive (the FM transmitter) is technically a rebroadcast of whatever they are transmitting on AM. If the quality of the AM signal is actually so bad that nobody can receive it, then they will forfeit their FM license too.

They don’t have a FM license, they have a translator license that is contingent on their AM license.

Even without a proper modulation monitor, simply tuning a radio to the station will tell you if you're on-air or not.

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.

A more likely scenario is the owner was strapped for cash and arranged for a crew to take the tower.

Especially because the transmitters disappeared, too. ALL the station equipment disappearing? Wonder who's got it now, or what it's been parted out to for other AM radio stations scraping together gear to keep running.

Smash and grabs of transmitter building equipment are relatively quick. They set off alarms (usually) of course, but you can get out in 15 minutes with a few racks of gear.

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.

What do you mean they don’t monitor for silence?

https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2022/07/articles/fcc-cracki...

You should read the linked decisions in the article.

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.

That article does not talk about the FCC monitoring ordinary licensees for "silence" (which I assume means off-air i.e. transmitter turned off, and not dead-air i.e. broadcast of silent audio).

(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.

In some markets, they are still operating off of NTSC tape formats and equipment. They have a device to upres the content to HD right before going to the transmitter. All because they are in such a small market, and there's not enough money to justify buying HD equipment.

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.

A lot of this monitoring comes from dissatisfied listeners and amateur radio operators. It's not really the FCC.

After they get a report, they have direction-finding equipment that they are very good at using, though.

> He should have been paged 2 seconds after the signal stopped.

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.

It is not legal to operate a remote transmitter site without full telemetry coming back to a human (studio) operator, or (more recently) an automated system which will alert a chief engineer, which is a required designee of all licensees.

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.

According to Wikipedia, the station has changed hands a few times in recent years because the owners kept going bankrupt, and furthermore the station has gone off the air numerous times before due to deferred maintenance. So noncompliance seems like a very safe bet!

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...

> 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.

> 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?

Definitely US.

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.

> It is not legal to operate a remote transmitter site without full telemetry coming back to a human

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.

I have, but never for a company that didn't care whether their signal was propagating.

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.

Which is why I trust corporations more than small businesses. Big companies can't cut corners in quite the same way as tiny shops, nor can they directly violate health&safety regulations, creating health risk for customers, without fear of consequences.

> Big companies can't cut corners in quite the same way as tiny shops,

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.

At least I would not knowingly commit crimes so the private equity makes some tens of thousands of dollars and I get a “meets expectations” and 2% annual raise at best if doing so could put me at risk of going to prison.

> if doing so could put me at risk of going to prison

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.

> It is not legal to operate a remote transmitter site without [...]

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).

Ah, thank you. There is also the "dead mans switch" monitoring option, which is probably in use at some very understaffed stations.

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.

It's not that hard, and most of the smaller AM and FM facilities I've seen (ones where snakes nest on top of the transmitter and wild turkeys try to chase off the engineer the one time a year the tower gets a visit) still have some sort of monitor. Plus... especially with AM, there's always at least one old folk sitting there with it on 24-7. It's usually a race between the engineer and that older person to see who calls the studio or owner first!

Yes! I loved those guys. They were always guys. :)

I have called my local station about dead air a couple times. I was the first to tell them. One time in recent memory, it went on for so long that I forgot the radio was on when they came back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com