What I’ve mostly been doing since Thanksgiving is researching radio stations I’ve never been able to find. One of the tools that is helpful is Google Earth Street View. It’s my belief there are 1000 radio stations that have ceased operating and not told the FCC, or perhaps just have an unattended computer – not complying with the spirit or the letter of the law about having a studio and a staffed business office.
Here is the location of WRJL-FM 99.9, located in Eva, Alabama (Population 491). Information from various sources suggests they play Southern Gospel music.
(Click image to see larger version)
So I see two flagpoles with no flag, three satellite dishes, an antenna that is an FAA hazard as it isn’t being painted, a sign out front for the Olive Branch Christian Music Store.
Active radio station or zombie? You be the judge.
Doing a little more research than normal, the station is owned by the widow and children of a man who died in 2004
Here is the grocery store next door
http://jacksfoodland.com
Awesome. I love small business. I would like to have a building like that and have maybe, CB radio repair, sell RV parts, and in the back some bays to run an oil change service for your car and maybe window tinting.
EPA probably would let me do it, but I probably could put up some dum-ass wind turbine and call it green energy, kill birds, annoy my neighbors, continue the FAA hazard and make a killing with the government ‘cheese’ subsidies handed out to owners of wind mills. I have a relative that lives in Lubbock Texas, and he says if they ask to put a wind turbine on your land, you have hit the proverbial Lottery. $420,000 per year paid to the land owner, that was in 2010. who knows what it is now. Yeah you have to clean up the dead birds, that’s the only drawback. Idiocy.
Its a messed up country these days.
parrott
your relative has one of those Green Jobs that “can’t be outsourced” (AKA tax payer cash cow).
I’ll drive over to Eva and check this out, some weekend! Haven’t been there since I was in high school. 🙂
Small world 🙂 that was totally random.
You know how Free Talk Live is taking over Keene New Hampshire, and TRN took over Grant’s Pass Oregon. Maybe SR Guide should “take over” Eva. They have 3 gas stations, a dollar general, a dentist, Jack’s Foodland, a Carpet Store and a drug store. Pretty much everything we need to survive, and nobody will look for us there.
If you really want to get away from it all, you might consider Buford/Phin Deli Town, Wyoming. Population: 1.
http://www.wyomingnews.com/articles/2013/08/08/news/01top_08-08-13.txt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhinDeli_Town_Buford,_Wyoming
I’ve been toying with the idea for a while of creating volunteer way to do this research “on the ground” – using the web only takes you so far. The picture in this case provided a lot of useful clues, but its rare for one to be this clear.
Here is the general concept – you would use the “Show All AM/FM stations near me (whether you’re at home or traveling or driving around) and use the location of your phone to generate a list of radio stations you should be able to hear where you are
http://streamingradioguide.com/findme.php
and you could scan the dial and say “Yep, it’s there” and mark it off the list. This is vaguely what DXers do as a hobby. What’s the objective of doing this? I’m not sure, and people may have different opinions. The FCC is wildly understaffed. They only react to complaints (maybe) and don’t accept “It looks like the station is off the air” reports except from Qualified Industry Experts.
More likely some of the stations are on the air, but are running with much lower power to save electricity – the rule is you have to ask permission to run at less than 90% power, and I’m not really a “Let’s ask the government for permission” type of guy.
A reason to not do this is the issue of copper theft – poorly guarded radio towers are prime targets for people going in and stealing the copper for the trivial scrap metal value – the cost of replacing the copper can push stations “over the edge” into giving up completely.
I just added the ability to sort the list by frequency or power or the default of distance.
Computing the Signal Strength of any particular station where you are standing is more than a bit tricky. How much a signal fades over a distance is a combination of the distance (imagine the signal is in a circle and as you get further away, the amount of energy possible falls off the way you would think in geometry – but it also falls off based on (roughly) how many times the signal had to bounce up and down 🙂 So signals at a very high frequency (like your cell phone) oscillate about once an inch. WBT has a Wavelength of about 900 feet. This was understood in 1928 when the AM rules were set up, which is why the “important” radio stations are generally on the lower end of the dial, although it’s not that simple – the way signals bounce off the ionosphere at night also varies – plus the lower the frequency of your station, the taller your tower has to be to resonate correctly. Most AM stations use a 1/4 wave vertically polarized antenna, which means the tower for WBT has to be about 250 feet high. A station on 540 has to use a 400 foot antenna, and that’s a huge difference in terms of cost and danger of collapse. So the Big Guys assigned themselves the “sweet spot” in the middle which balanced the Antenna Size and the largest footprint of the signal
Additional reading
http://radiomagonline.com/transmission/antennas/radio_tall_am_towers/
Interesting article, wish they’d kept the links alive for the illustrations.
While reading, the headline for another item caught my attention. Apparently, conditions have been met in Norway for the end of the FM band, to be supplanted by DAB+ as the main means of radio broadcast.
Meanwhile, I continue to lament the neglect of the AM band here in the U.S. Boy, am I behind the curve!
The benefits of multiplexing digital FM only become real when you disconnect the ownership of the license from the operation of the transmitter – feeding all the stations to a central site run by the government or a third party, sending one multiplexed signal containing every station, then let the receiver choose which channel to decode.
That sounds a lot like Sirius/XM
The thorny problem that creates is – once spectrum doesn’t matter, why would the government still license who is allowed to speak?
Glenn Beck said something this morning that I absolutely believe to be true – the end game of Net Neutrality is requiring government licenses and approval to publish anything on the Internet.
Long wave radio (below the AM band) requires an even taller antenna. Poland built one over 2000 feet tall to beam polka music all over the world from an 2 Mw transmitter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_radio_mast
Why did the Polish radio tower collapse?