Guardian News:
Small radio station forced to go silent after ‘unbelievable’ theft of giant tower.
Hi this is my first post, big fan of you and Dark Journalist.
Messaging from Ireland and I have an extensive background in Radio Broadcasting.
This “Story” was laughed at as not believable by us all in industry.
There is no way your Transmitter would be gone off air and you would not know about it immediately,
Plus lots of Street View evidence and other from Radio enthusiasts suggesting the AM and tower was long gone and not in use.
So what was happening?
The station is an AM only station, the FM in this case is a crude link frequency and not supposed to be used or promoted as a broadcast frequency for listeners.
It’s low power FM from studio to be picked up and rebroadcast on AM at the TX site.
However AM is VERY costly to run, but FM is not costly to run and better quality signal.
So you sneakily boost your FM signal and the authorities (FCC in this case) are likely to never know.
You then build up your FM listenership.
Then you illegally switch off your AM, which breaks your contract, but it’s unlikely to be noticed by the EG FCC.
A lot of stations are doing this.
The station then got sussed by the authorities and needs to explain their missing AM service and had two choices, either admit they broke contract and ditched their AM and are using illegal power on FM or say it was stolen by the same dog that ate their homework…
So!
It didn’t happen!
It’s that prosaic!
Cheers All,
Bernard
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