This is an amazing sidebar story. How could a tower crew not recognize the perforations and markings on the tower sections? Maybe Temu was selling tower services?
The FCC has been known to request an efficiency study on these types of antennas before they approve it.
I´m particularly fascinated by the use of that kind of antenna by "Michigan's Beautiful North" of the former Paul Bunyan Network....
The old WKNR 1310 Keener 13 6 tower array, now WDTW, was also installed upside down. They rebuilt it with shorter towers that didn't require lighting and six radials about 10 feet above the ground when they put it back on the air. I imagine that it was WKMH when you probably heard it frequently at Night in NW Lower Michigan before 1963.
There's the temporary inverted V, and soon the permanent short wound tower with the strange looking top loading that looks like a balloon. Around 15 miles away, I measured just 60 uV/m with the inverted V. Actually, the old site might have 3 mS/m near the lake, but not on the beach, versus probably 0.1 mS/m on the sandy hill. They use it to feed the translator, which is roughly equivalent to a 3 kW Class A at a high HAAT.
I believe the Alsip site dates back to either the late 80s or early 90s. Before WRDZ there was WTAQ Lagrange IL (Towns Along the Quincy) that had it's transmitting site at Joliet Rd. and East Ave in Country Side just south of Lagrange. Think Bill Wardly owned the station and did an afternoon talk show every week day. Ralph Faucher who did White Sox games for a few years with Harry Carry was the sales manager. Believe it was Wardly who sold to the real estate developers and Disney took over the station and moved it to Alsip.
The requested STA appears to be lacking data to ever get approved in its current form. I assume they are setting up the short vertical at the decommissioned Alsip site. Think all they mentioned was "current site".
Never seen one of these antennas in actual use. I assume they will become more popular moving forward as more land is sold for profit. There's hope for WSCR and WBBM after the AM 1160 land is sold off down the road!
The FCC is apparently concerned about whether the efficiency is too high so as to extend the service contour beyond the 25% power nondirectional from a different location. I know of one in Michigan that had to submit the additional efficiency information before they approved it.
Reminds me of a station where the engineer, with no radio experience, read that an AM needed to buy about 2500 meters of copper wire. He bought them, soldered the reels together and buried them next to the antenna... still on the reels.
There's no "This Side Up" marking?
Apparently not, but perhaps there should be. The old Keener 13 towers rusted out in the same way as the WTAQ/WRDZ towers did. I don't know when that happened, because a tornado also took out a couple of the Keener 13 towers around 1980. They took all of them down when they replaced the array. It would seem like they wouldn't have made the same mistake twice.
