Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Someone stole a Jasper radio station’s 200-foot tower, owner says

al.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 259 posts

Re: Someone stole a Jasper radio station’s 200-foot tower, owner says

#201

Post by mikey_p »

thih9 wrote: post #144

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

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.

Re: Someone stole a Jasper radio station’s 200-foot tower, owner says

#202

Post by sillysaurusx »

m463 wrote: post #134
huytersd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if you’ve ever been around high tension mental cables before you’ll realize you need a huge pair of balls to cut those. It’s not safety protocols, it’s fear that it might cut you in half.

If you cut a wire under tension at the very limit of its range on one end, can it hurt you?

I had the same question. Intuitively, I don’t think so, but that’s based on nothing but simulating it in my head. In reality you might risk the tower collapsing on you if you cut too many.

Re: Someone stole a Jasper radio station’s 200-foot tower, owner says

#203

Post by sillysaurusx »

pgrote wrote: post #169
Xirgil wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminals don't make sense to you because you're trying to explain their behavior with your own thought process. You're likely much smarter than they are, with a better understanding of risk vs reward and lower impulsivity. Also you can't explain criminal behavior with purely financial motivations. Car thieves are not making $33k per car. A lot of them don't even sell them, just steal what's inside and use them for a…

How do you know?

Seconded! Sounds like interesting stories.

Re: Someone stole a Jasper radio station’s 200-foot tower, owner says

#204

Post by rstephenson2 »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #178

How did they not notice this immediately themselves instead of having a landscaping crew notify them? When I was a broadcast engineer, we were required to constantly monitor the on-the-air signal. In addition, that tower is live. How did they disconnect it without serious shock?

The most plausible theory to me: this is all FCC licensing related, where the owner is operating an FM station that is licensed as an AM station + repeater, but _nobody_ listens to the AM station or cares. Other comments say they haven’t been broadcasting on AM in ~5 years, so it seems likely that it was stolen much earlier and nobody noticed. The Jeff Geerling video kind of supports this, but doesn’t call anyone out since it is speculative. Because if it is true, the station either didn’t notice, or ignored it until the landscapers filed a report, forcing them to address it and pretend like it just happened.

Re: Someone stole a Jasper radio station’s 200-foot tower, owner says

#205

Post by healsdata »

HPsquared wrote: post #165
Stratoscope wrote: post #148

> The FCC also notified WJLX on Thursday morning that the station would have to go off the air because of the theft. While WJLX still has its FM transmitter and tower, it is not allowed to operate its FM transmitter while the AM station is off the air. W.T.F.? I've been following this story, and as a ham operator I am usually a big fan of the FCC. But I don't understand why the loss of the station's AM tower should r…

I wonder how much "economic" activity goes towards satisfying arbitrary requirements such as these.

"arbitrary"

Re: Someone stole a Jasper radio station’s 200-foot tower, owner says

#206

Post by fbdab103 »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #197
brookst wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that infuriating? It’s accurate, acknowledges the suboptimal photo choice (or availability), and has some humor. As an editor, given this as your only photo choice, what caption would you write?

Question is moot because I would just do my job to the minimum acceptable standard of competence by sourcing a picture of the actual tower

So...a picture of some random sky? Maybe draw an outline of what the tower would look like if it were there?

Re: Someone stole a Jasper radio station’s 200-foot tower, owner says

#207

Post by dageshi »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #197
brookst wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that infuriating? It’s accurate, acknowledges the suboptimal photo choice (or availability), and has some humor. As an editor, given this as your only photo choice, what caption would you write?

Question is moot because I would just do my job to the minimum acceptable standard of competence by sourcing a picture of the actual tower

How and where would you source it from? The tower is gone, there's likely no public domain images of it, no stock images of it, so where do you get a picture of it?

Re: Someone stole a Jasper radio station’s 200-foot tower, owner says

#208

Post by fbdab103 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #162
Bluestrike2 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ridiculousl…

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.

Re: Someone stole a Jasper radio station’s 200-foot tower, owner says

#209

Post by 1over137 »

seadan83 wrote: post #199
graemep wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my earliest memories of something in the newspapers was, as a teenager, finding out a picture in The Guardian was of any entirely different conflict, more than a decade earlier, albeit in the same country. The media did not really care much about accuracy then, and its even worse now.

A single example of one inaccuracy many years ago is not evidence for (at least as far as the Guardian is concerned): "The media did not really care much about accuracy then, and its even worse now." To say that, you would also need to know the actual accuracy rate of media over time. I don't think anyone really knows that without perhaps having done a PhD thesis on the topic. What's more, good media publishes citati…

>In this case, I think the resource was looking for just a stock photo.

God forbid they just write their article with no photo at all. Better to use a wrong one apparently.

Re: Someone stole a Jasper radio station’s 200-foot tower, owner says

#210

Post by 1over137 »

brookst wrote: post #191
flaminHotSpeedo wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The caption is infuriating: > "A different radio tower, which has presumably not been stolen"

Why is that infuriating? It’s accurate, acknowledges the suboptimal photo choice (or availability), and has some humor. As an editor, given this as your only photo choice, what caption would you write?

>As an editor, given this as your only photo choice, what caption would you write?

I would just not include a photo at all.

Post reply on HN