Slashdot Mirror
Old AM Broadcast Towers Get a New Life
Esther Schindler shares an article from Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Video may have killed the radio star, but other media certainly make old AM radio towers superfluous... maybe. "As once-loyal listeners tune away, most AM stations are barely holding onto life, slashing staff and budgets as deeply as they can while struggling to find a return to profitability," reports HPE. "Once upon a time, having a broadcast license of any kind was like having a permit to print money. In today's world, that's no longer true." But, with some 10,000 AM broadcast towers in the United States stretching high into the sky, there may be an opportunity for wireless carriers who don't want to argue with community opposition from neighborhoods where residents don't want yet another cell tower. The amount of money an AM station owner can pocket by sharing its tower with a wireless partner varies widely, depending on the tower's location, height, and several other factors. But it's certainly more income -- and a way to keep "old" technology from becoming obsolete. "Using an AM tower, which has very often been in place for many years, avoids many zoning and other permitting issues, versus going in and creating a new site for a tower," Behr explains. He says local residents, businesses, and officials rarely complain about an AM broadcast tower that suddenly begins serving as a cell site. "That tower was there before they were, and it doesn't bother them," Lawrence Behr, CEO of Greenville, North Carolina-based LBA Group, says. "Hanging a few things on it is rarely controversial, so that's a real good thing for AMs."
tower sharing and leasing space on them is not news, not new, and has been done since the dawn of radio broadcasting.
Please please please think of the children and all the cancer this is going to cause!
Funny note: I have an account on nextdoor. Someone's first post was "I just found out about this tower that was approved for installation (before I moved into the neighborhood). How can I stop it?" So apparently, people seem to believe that they should get retroactive say in communities now. It that or a competing carrier trying to stir up trouble. In the meantime, I get one bar in my Washington DC suburb.
In the northeast US, cell antennae are put on top of existing buildings and hidden inside church bell towers. What's the big whoop about attaching a cell antenna to an existing tower of any kind? Nobody thought of that yet? Wuh?
Will it? Anything but talk or shit-kicker? Will Trump not go stark raving mad real soon now? Will the Republicans do anything then? That matters?
ALL NO!
I have yet to meet an AM operator that has a staff greater then one. Maybe if they are into cutting they might be slashing staff....
Honest question - isn't it necessary to de-energise the transmitter before technicians can climb the tower to install or maintain hardware? Presumably it happens in the graveyard shift. The ERP right at the tower must be quite high.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
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Mast sharing was done since the '50. In thiss photo you could see two masts sharing AM plus FM plus TV VHF plus TV UHF plus microwave links The AM antenna is the T shaped wire between the masts. I am not surbrised at all that you coluls share services, because there masts are quite costly.
Mounting on an AM tower requires decoupling the antenna and transmission line from the AM antenna. The antenna resistance of the tower would have to be remeasured to show this had been accomplished. This would be particularly difficult on a directional station. Perhaps the FCC would relax rules on non directional AM's to reduce these requirements since AM station contours are not so critical any more.
crap that is broadcast on it all day, every day. Right wing political rants, conspiracy theorists, and religious kooks have taken over all the space between the baseball games. Every station broadcasts continuous running advertisements interrupted occasionally by "programming", which is itself mostly advertising. We have a lot of stupid people in the US, but how even they listen to that for more than a few minutes at a time?
AM broadcast radio is going the same way SW radio (also AM broadcast, except at higher frequencies) did back in the 80s and 90s. The big players give up on it, then the religious nuts take over, then it fades into obscurity.
AM radio is dying because there is too much electrical noise to make it a fun listening experience, unless you like pops, cracks, whining noises with your audio.
I love the various attempts at making cell towers look like trees. Some blend in very well. Others are very obviously fake, especially when there are no other trees around. Still, they look better than naked metal.
I went past an AM tower and had explosive diarrhea. Obviously it wasn't from eating at Chipotle. It had to be the tower!
The tower itself generally acts as the antenna radiator, and sits on a big ceramic insulator at the base. The tower is at a high RF voltage in reference to earth ground.
Attaching auxiliary equipment to an AM tower would be a nightmare because of this fact. everything on the tower would be floating at hundreds/thousands of RF volts above ground. The power into and data out of the equipment would need special decoupling/filtering to keep the RF on the tower and out of the power/data lines. Sensitive electronics in general aren't going to like becoming part of an antenna like that, and the loading effect of bolting "stuff" onto the tower may shift the FCC-regulated radiation pattern of the station, as well.
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The AM broadcast-band, (and its close relatives, the short wave bands), allow for long-distance radio communications. Even in the daytime the coverage is pretty good; but at night, when the ionosphere allows for 'running skip', its reach is truly impressive. There may be times in the future when that's crucial for reaching people over very large geographical areas. We really need to backstop our wired networks with wireless analog broadcast capability. It can reach anybody who has a $5 pocket radio, it continues to work even when all you have is batteries or generators and a tower, and it doesn't rely on hard links that can easily be broken. And it's already there, fer chrissake - all we have to do is maintain it.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Be a Lefty Pussy-man and don't even fuck them properly. Molest young ladies with a cigar.
That's "Progressive".
Little wonder Bill Clinton managed to have only a single child and Hillary is bitter.
Long wave wifi!
Damn Kids, you and your VHF and microwave bullshit. Get off my lawn. For AM broadcast, the tower is the antenna in many cases. It's called a mast radiator. And if you had paid attention in class, you'd know it doesn't necessarily have to be insulated. Many are center fed gamma antennas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_radiator
I'm sure an AI block chain would optimize this!
unlike TV and FM towers, the AM tower > IS the antenna. the tower is hot. they are isolated by placing them atop large ceramic insulators. if the station is still on the air, this poses gigantic grounding and potential RF coupling into a cell service.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
AM towers are resonant antennas, isolated from ground, on giant load-bearing glass or ceramic insulators. you haven't seen one. tipoff is the arc rings at the base of at lease one tower leg, two non-connected circles, one to the tower leg, one to a grounding field. the occasional contesting ham radio operator will have a live tower, but everything else is grounded. not AM radio and some specialty systems around the medium wave band.
if you were to run a vertical antenna isolated from the tower, it would be subject to significant weather damage, and the tower would shield it for an appreciable section of its radiation. you could get away with it in the days of the wooden tower, but they are long gone, and usually held the ends of folded dipoles or zepps.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Should the desperation of radio not be a lesson for the modern marketing shills like Google and Facebook? It's a terrible model to build an empire not on providing products and services but on selling out to marketing. It is the most parasitic of American ways.
This is where Microsoft and Apple differ. They provide the populous with genuine products and services. Too bad the unwashed masses are poor judges of merit to exist.
Some of the towers I've seen are not capable of handing an offset weight like tower man toting tools and gear. The amount of corrosion on the tower will force a judgement call by the techs on if it will be scaleable or no. There's not going to be palms greased by the green stuff as incentive, this is life or death.
A 30 year old tower went down last year during Harvey. It was a 200 footer, rated for 160-180 MPH winds. Harvey sported 180 and it came down in a pile of pipes and cables. Another 175 footer that was adjacent to it still stands, but It's questionable if it is serviceable.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Slightly off-topic, but the thought has occurred to me more than once: They keep having to put up more and more cell towers, festooned with as many antennas as it can hold, to meet consumer demand -- and apparently it's not enough, because if there's an emergency and everyone is trying to dial out simultaneously, the system gets overloaded and calls don't go through. Cellular base stations can only support so many simultaneous calls at once. When and where is the point of critical mass going to occur? Where I'm going with this is: What's the technology that's going to ultimately have to be developed to replace this technology? Something that doesn't require so many towers and so many antennas everywhere you look?
any places Im personally aware of, that no longer use their AM tower, had it torn down within a year of the station either moving or going off the air. Who's got one left that isn't still active?
...and slashdot is talking about AM Radio?
no wonder I never come here anymore.
this is probably still at the conference-room-table stage. I will bet you two germanium transistors nobody has talked to an AM station engineer or walked to the base of a tower that is off the air (too much RF exposure to walk up when it's fired up.) look at the arc rings. see the tower legs bolted to the insulators. discover reality.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
and that's the truth.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
unless and until a strap failed and the cell hardline shorted to the tower. then, whack, everything off the air.
however, the strong omnidirectional AM field might well be fatal to the cell system's electronics. whoever has control of the former RCA antenna test site, then Cetek, then who knows who, can make a little coin here setting up tests.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The *problem* for using AM broadcast towers for cell phones and line of sight RF links is they are usually not located in the right places and are usually taken down when the station goes bust unless they are under 200' tall.
AM is pretty low frequency and this means that you didn't need line of sight to the tower to receive it. During the day, propagation to the local area was almost assured, even with a modest antenna and ground plane. You didn't need a tall tower or an elevated location, you just needed a modest one you could load with a good ground plane that was close to the center of your desired coverage area. This means AM towers are not all that useful for RF line of sight links, they are not tall enough and they are in the wrong places.
Any tower over 200' requires marking by the FAA regulations. This means that a tower owner MUST maintain the lights/paint on any tower over 200' or they risk getting fined. If the tower was used for a station that's out of business and was over 200' tall, it gets taken down and sold for scrap so you don't have to pay the electric bill and for somebody to climb up and replace the light bulbs or repaint. If it's under 200', how useful is it to a line of sight RF link?
Now.. FM and TV towers are TOTALLY different situations. Both FM and TV are limited to line of sight (plus a fraction) so they are TALL and in locations that overlook large geographic areas. However, the article is about the towers left behind when AM stations go bust... Which isn't going to be all that useful...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
1) AM Transmission towers, if active, will have tens of thousands of watts of RF energy coursing through them while the station is transmitting - I suspect that will have a negative impact on the performance of the data systems you want to locate on the tower.
2) AM Transmission towers are hundreds of feet tall, and while properly zoned and permitted, are designed merely to support themselves - they are not designed or installed to support hundreds of pounds of radio equipment and antennas attached to the tower - that adds what is called windload, and will likely bring the tower down in the next big storm.
3) I would have to imagine that the data radio equipment will be installed at the base, and low-loss hardline will be run up hundreds of feet up the tower to provide a signal to the data system antennas - while you save weight on the tower by placing the radios on the ground, you incur a massive amount of weight running 300-400 feet of hardline up the tower.
4) The land the transmission tower is located on is huge, and probably worth far more than the fees a shuttered AM station owner could collect by adding some data service equipment on an idle tower. It takes acres and acres of land to properly support the average AM broadcast antenna system (it's not unusual for multiple several hundred foot towers to comprise one broadcast antenna).
5) TV and FM broadcasters typically share antennas on a broadcast tower, there is no glut of idle FM or TV broadcast towers.
6) Broadcast TV stations are going to remain on the air, because by being a local Over The Air broadcaster they have certain rights that gets their station on all local cable systems, increasing their market share.
Ken
They are the primary and secondary halves of an "Austin Ring" transformer, which is used to get 120V power onto the tower to run the aircraft marker lights. The design is to reduce capacitance between the primary and secondary far below that of a conventional transformer, so as not to short the RF signal on the tower to ground.
Flashover spark gaps for lightning protection are also found at the tower base, but usually in the form of a ball gap. They are set to flash over at voltages just a bit higher than the peak RF voltage at 100% modulation.
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Yes we need to keep the LF, MF and HF infrastructure. But we can go digital. A single chip radio that can decode DAB, DRM and HD Radio can be made cheaply... So it wouldn't be a $5 radio, it'd be a $20 radio... but "AM Radio" could go through a digital switchover, spurring deployment of even cheaper radios.
where you find non-commercial and educational stations (below 92 MHz).
There are 2 nice college stations (WFMU and WFUV) that come in fairly well near me.
For lefty talk, there was always Pacifica/WBAI, but they ran off the rails with an internal coup almost 20 years ago. Now they air all kinds of magic cancer cure scams and some fairly regressive Mugabe-worshipping talk show hosts.
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Digital is for terrorists. They will require a subscription to decode. Also, digital sucks and only the gays like it.
The majority of AM towers were built in the 40-50â(TM)s. Many commercial towers built in the 80â(TM)s-90â(TM)s wonâ(TM)t pass the TIA Rev G structural analysis. Weâ(TM)ve had a few that would NOT pass even without loading. Considering the age of AM towers, I say it ainâ(TM)t gonna happen because of the loading. *Replacing* an AM antenna with an identical tower using the same ASR maybe, but Iâ(TM)m not certain on the legality of that, regulation-wise. I call BS.
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