As far as I know, you are correct. Unfortunately for you and me, people react on their emotions and not necessarily on factual information.
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Saving AM Radio
- Thread starter BruceB
- Start date
As far as I know, you are correct. Unfortunately for you and me, people react on their emotions and not necessarily on factual information.
It was general-purpose NIMBY ism that killed a new site for WFNI. NIMBYs almost rely on scare tactics of all sorts, and they are a problem for all kinds of construction, from housing developments to power plants.
The people who sit on zoning boards aren't experts and usually are volunteers or make a small stipend. They don't really care if the claims the NIMBYs make are scientifically accurate, they just don't want to make their constituents angry.
There are plenty of reasons to not want radio towers in your back yard besides non-ionizing radiation. High power RF in close proximity can cause interference to home or business electronics equipment. Towers can fall. Aircraft can crash into them. They're ugly and can negatively impact property values. Etc.
I realize this board is full of radio enthusiasts who support tower construction, but these are still facts.
Sorry, but these are not facts.
First, I support private property rights in all settings, not just broadcast. That means you have the right to use your property as you please. If I want to demolish my house and lease the property to Verizon for a cell tower, or to 7-Eleven for a convenience store, that is my right. Unfortunately, NIMBY's infringe on that right, largely drawing upon the powers of zoning laws. For similar reasons, judging future property values is not an appropriate use of governmental powers.
Second, the reasons you list are not reasonable fears. There are thousands upon thousands of broadcast, cellular, and microwave towers in the US, and the number of aircraft collisions is essentially zero. I think there was one across the whole US last year, in Houston. The only casualties were the occupants of the helicopter.
Once in a while a tower collapses due to weather (hurricanes, ice storms, etc), but I have never heard of a tower collapsing and landing on someone else's property, since towers are designed to crumple upon themselves. There is no danger to the public from living adjacent to a broadcast tower as your "facts" claimed.
Something being "ugly" is a matter of opinion and not fact.
Actually, there are legal limits to what you can do with property that you own. You cannot, for example, place a store inside a piece of property that is zoned for residential usage. Whether one likes it or not, we live in a world with other people and we sometimes have to acquiesce to their demands if we wish to keep the peace. And that includes the placement of radio towers!
If towers were ugly would Scott Fybush photograph them?
Robert Douglas
Banned
My favorite Fybush is the old KGFJ "clothes line" on top of the odd fellows building at the corner of I-10 and whatever you call the L.A.Harbor freeway these days. That thing was amazing - no tower, 1000 watts, rating #2 in Los Angeles in 1969.
Longwires on rooftops work fine if they have a decent counterpoise system (the name for a ground system that is in the air).
My first job at WJMO in Cleveland was "underneath" the tower and counterpoise of the station on the 2nd floor roof of an auto dealer. Then, when I built my first station in Ecuador in 1964, out of 31 AM stations in the market, only 4 had vertical towers; the rest had longwire "Inverted L" systems hung between tree trunks with buried auto radiators as a ground.
1KW KXA Seattle go out pretty well on 770 from a long wire antenna, as late as the 1970s!
Frequent jingle by a group of singers: "KGFJ the Sound of Success!"
No one outside of radio geeks misses this particular tower farm. I don't blame the zoning board for not approving an eyesore like that for, sadly, a completely unnecessary AM station
Ah, but if radio is in your blood, towers are nearly an object of worship. I'm betting Fybush would agree, but then again, maybe not.
This was taken on a trip to Athens, Greece back in 1996. I always joked that these are not antennas, but are in fact shrines to the Greek god Televisios.
Attachments
I saw a similar scene in Colusa, CA, a small town in the northern central valley. Everywhere I looked, there were antennas on towers just like that photo!
Of course, I didn't think to take any photos of it....
c
I do a lot of virtual traveling with Google street view. It's amazing how many shacks (and I mean shacks) have satellite dishes. And in every part of the world.
I wouldn't say any station AM or FM is unnecessary. In fact many years before LP FM, I advocated that some kind of "LP AM" should be authorized: they would be 10 to 25 Watt stations on what were then Class 4 channels, i.e. (1230,1240,1340,1400,1450,1490) as long as their operation would not cause any interference to existing full power (1kW) facilities. Many localities could therefore have a truly community radio station.
Robert Douglas
Banned
This is the spirit we need for saving AM radio. It's not going to be the same, so let it be something new and different. Small towns need their own station as long as we still have radios in cars and some homes. The FM dial is full in many of these places, while the AM dial is empty. "LP AM", let's do it.
The reason why small town "regular" AM stations are closing is that there is not enough advertiser support in the era of big box stores and web purchasing. Trying to get a station to run with volunteers, as we know, is beyond difficult.
AM is an expensive operation compared to FM and much more technical. Sure, many small towns need a station, perhaps volunteer operated but mostly a computer in a closet with some community announcements and high school sports. I'm even thinking areas where the radio station in the county seat tends to center more on the local community but there are other small towns with school districts in the county who get very little recognition and no high school sports coverage out of the county seat station.
This is largely how it works in the Netherlands, but the vast majority of the LPAM stations are anorak and hobby operations, playing oldies and nostalgic radio recordings, mostly to an audience of one (the person running the station). There are very few providing a service genuinely aimed at the public at large. There's nothing wrong with it, it does zero harm and gives people some signals to tune in on AM, but it doesn't provide a great deal of community benefit.