They recently switched to LED a few months ago and according to a video posted by Chief Engineer Charles Kinney, the lights in the shopping mall parking lot where WSB's tower is located now flash like a rave and make you think youre tripping.
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WSB 750 And The Shopping Mall Parking Lot Lights
- Thread starter SomeRadioGuy
- Start date
It's on Charles personal fb page, and thats set to private, so i cant link to it.
They occasionally split the AM from the FM for drawn out Congressional hearings. Unless it's share of the audience doesn't cover the power bill, I doubt they will get rid of it. The last guesstimate I heard, something like 10 percent of WSB's audience still uses the AM. I doubt they will sell it just to keep out another competitor like Salem.
It's a shame digital AM never caught on, it would have enough coverage for one of the format holes in Atlanta.
I can see the WSB tower from my front lawn. The lights look cool from here. I'll have to drive to the shopping center to see what it's like there.
Back in the early 1970's WLAC had a florescent light that glowed even when turned off at the transmitter building when they were direction at night. They also had a complaint from a near by Church that got a new organ you could hear 1510 in the background. Life and Causality sent their engineer out and he fixed it. There has been lots of building within 5 miles of the tower site since. I bet they have had more complaints.
I highly doubt management even knows what the tower is for.
Heard that farmers reported the signal coming off of fencing. Also heard that mattresses with springs also produced sound.
Not sure how true all of it is (this was way before my time,) but 500kw sure is a lot.
I drove to the shopping center. The new LED lights are not really noticeable from the parking lot.
On the lot right near the tower, however, 4 bright lights on polls seemed to be malfunctioning, flickering on and off. They, not the tower lights, were causing the “tripping” effect.
The LEd's are tripping because of the AM;s 50kw.. which is what i meant to imply with my post
Now I get what you’re saying.
The lights on the tower also are new. They were switched out from red lights to white strobe-type lights.
Nowadays, yes. But when the shopping center was built back in the 80s they had to tie all of the electrical to the tower ground to prevent arcing.
Do they flash at daytime? If so, they might be able to quit painting the tower. How many "air miles" from PDK or any other general aviation airport are they? I haven't dealt with the FAA in 30+ years, but if you were honest with them they were surprisingly flexible with temporary waivers if you were not close to and airport.
A WSB engineer told me that when any business in the shopping center wants to make any kind of electrical change, it needs to involve WSB's engineers.
When I first came to Atlanta and found the WSB tower, I was curious as to whether the businesses in the shopping center knew what it was. So I asked a cashier in Office Max , and he said, "It's a little power station."
Many LED lamps have crappy power supplies that fail after a short amount of exposure to the elements and begin cycling on and off rapidly, even with no high-power RF nearby. If all the lamps in an area were replaced at once, this failure mode can happen to nearly all of them almost simultaneously, suddenly turning a parking lot into a disco party.
The old airport at Stone Mountain is closed...the closest would be PDK.
There is a big approach to ATL that comes down I-85.
They don't ignore the AM, and it gets used for special programming when they split the signals. That being said, they are in the business of making money and the reality is, that people listen to FM. CK
The WSB-AM tower has white LED's now for the daytime and red LED's at night. As for the tower painting, it's not needed for FAA compliance, but since it's a black iron tower, painting is needed to protect the structure.
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