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FM DXing: Using an FM broadcast tower as a receive antenna
- Thread starter yeoldeschool
- Start date
I like the safety of insuring the AC doesn't come on. I sure hope folks don't go breaking in transmitter sites to try this but really kool idea đź’ˇ. I wonder how many of these stations he can get in his truck? It appears to flat country.
From what I can see, appears to be a well maintained site
From what I can see, appears to be a well maintained site
I doubt the "nerdy homebody DX'er" and "breaking and entering" demographics overlap. 
Unless there's an eccentric "breaking and entering and engineering" demographic I don't know about.
(What I would give to see this done off the KCBS tower on Mt. Wilson. Or from the Empire State building.)
Unless there's an eccentric "breaking and entering and engineering" demographic I don't know about.
(What I would give to see this done off the KCBS tower on Mt. Wilson. Or from the Empire State building.)
i worked at a station with a 300 foot tower that lost our lease and moved to a new tower. after everything was disconnected and removed from the tower i took a portable AM radio and tried to DX connecting the tower itself to the antenna jack on the radio. it wasn't NEARLY as impressive as this one, but i was able to get a station with 5000w at 610khz at a distance of 168 miles. it wasn't very clear, but i did hear it.
this FM was directly hooked up to the FM antenna, not the tower itself, correct?
this FM was directly hooked up to the FM antenna, not the tower itself, correct?
It was hooked up to the antenna. Unless you are on really crappy soil conduction area (huge part of the southeast) or there is a directional antenna field nulling in your direction, 610 AM has coverage daytime. I would rather have 5kw non directional on 610 than 50kw non-directional 1550 any day.
It was in North Carolina, the old big WAYS (now WPZS) Charlotte. And yes the soil conductivity is crappy. The daytime coverage didn't reach me. I don't believe I could ever get it at night on the skywave. They are/were directional but their lobe was pointed almost toward me (in Wallace, NC). Even with the 300 foot antenna it was barely above the noise, not anywhere as clean as the OP's demonstration.
Yup. That and both sites crawling with generators for power outages is why I mentioned it wishfully.
Most of the transmitter rooms at Empire actually don't have backup generators. The stations there mostly have off-site auxiliary facilities.
How many have battery backups... and for how many hours?
I had a vague memory of the floor immediately beneath the transmitters being all electrical and generation. (Was I perhaps misattributing the old WTC arrangement to Empire?)
Historically, the Empire transmitter floors were 81, 82, 83 and 85. 84 is a mechanical floor, 86 is the outdoor observation deck, and 87 has combiner equipment and transmission lines. Post-9/11, office space on 78, 79 and part of 80 has also been converted into transmitter space.
You might have seen some of the electrical gear on 84, but not generators for the most part. There are no gas lines going up the building, and so the handful of rooms that have generators had them grandfathered in, and they have to haul jerry cans of fuel up in the elevators to fill the relatively small day tanks.
There's also not really room for big batteries or UPS, which is why there are so many off-site backups. Empire's a great site, but it doesn't have a lot of disaster resiliency and can't be easily refitted for that purpose. Many of the FMs and most of the few remaining TVs (Disney and Univision) have had more robust aux sites a few blocks away at 4 Times Square. Some of the other FMs have backups in West Orange, New Jersey, and one or two still have backups at Alpine at the Armstrong Tower.
You might have seen some of the electrical gear on 84, but not generators for the most part. There are no gas lines going up the building, and so the handful of rooms that have generators had them grandfathered in, and they have to haul jerry cans of fuel up in the elevators to fill the relatively small day tanks.
There's also not really room for big batteries or UPS, which is why there are so many off-site backups. Empire's a great site, but it doesn't have a lot of disaster resiliency and can't be easily refitted for that purpose. Many of the FMs and most of the few remaining TVs (Disney and Univision) have had more robust aux sites a few blocks away at 4 Times Square. Some of the other FMs have backups in West Orange, New Jersey, and one or two still have backups at Alpine at the Armstrong Tower.
I once hooked up a JRC Transciever to one two of a 3 tower array for DX reception purposes.. and it was nowhere near as good as youd think.. incredibly noisy
Hah, this is my video and site. I've also used one of the dead towers at KQWB-AM from when they were directional on 1550 to try and AM DX...that was a disaster. Even at night power the transmitter overloaded everything to the surprise of nobody. The AM band on the XDR-F1HD I used has never been the same and I couldn't even hear anything because it got into the speakers I was using haha
Small world. And thanks for the enjoyable video. Several of those catches were amazing.
Wish I knew it was gonna be this popular, I would've put more effort in haha. This was just gonna be something I threw together because I thought it was interesting
Small thread hijack, but in answer to your question...
I worked for an Infinity station in the late 90s-early 2000s. Just before Y2K...and I mean JUST before...Infinity decided that "no Infinity station would go off the air due to a Y2K related power failure!" That's a lot of FM stations in tall buildings no backup power, without generators and no way to get them. The mandate was stations had remain on the air during an outage for no less than 4 hours. The solution was to order up a whole big bunch of 500W FM transmitters and send them to each station along with fairly massive UPSs. UPSs were also bought for studios, often several, to keep servers and broadcast gear up. At least some (most? all?) of the transmitters were the Harris Quest, kind of a disaster in their own right, but apparently available. These were quickly installed, along with, in my case, a means to automatically fail-over to the low power TX on the UPS if shore power failed. The gear arrived days before the end of December, and my final test was to smack the main breaker open and take the power down. Everything worked, and the station was back up in a second or three (had to wait for the transfer switch). The test was done 12/30/99 at about 4:30pm. Not a lot of room for a glitch. None of it was ever actually used except for the studio UPS which did keep it up during a non-Y2K outage.