On August 27th, 2010, the old KHSL AM radio towers were taken down by a demolition company. The towers were constructed around 1947. After 63 years of continuously serving the Chico area with radio communications of one kind or another the towers are coming down and the transmission site is going silent.
You can see the two towers in the photo at left I took in May 2007.
This video below is the view of the East tower collapse after the guy wires were cut by the worker in the lower left with the cutting torch, about 10:05 AM PST. Once the guys were cut, the other two sets of guys under tension pulled the tower east past the tipping point, and then gravity took over to finish the job.
Watch the video below from this morning to see the demolition.
(apologies for the video quality, as Murphy’s law would have it, a small shred of black paper or plastic blew into the lens and wedged there, obscuring part of the lower right)
The West tower was taken down about 10:53 AM the same day. KHSL radio and TV veterans Gil Houston (former radio chief engineer) Dino Corbin, (General manager), Ken Rice, (former engineer) and myself (Anthony Watts) gathered to watch the event.
The towers were first erected in 1947. They were removed to make way for the new Merriam Park subdivision.
The call sign KHSL for radio has switched to the FM band as is now a country music station called 103.5 “The Blaze”. The 1290AM frequency that used to be KHSL-AM is now occupied by KPAY, where I now work. KPAY formerly was at 1060AM but purchased the 1290 frequency and moved to it in 1995.
More here from my friend Mark Sorenson, who if WUWT readers oblige by clicking this link, is about to have his biggest traffic day ever.
“Moving to a new location means re-engineering your antenna system to maintain protection to co-channel (same channel) existing stations or sometimes to adjacent (next to) existing stations by controlling the radiation (the transmit) pattern of the antenna array …”
Some people might take ‘protection’ to mean something other than we mean in radio when we use that term amongst ourselves.
In cellular coverage engineering, we used to have to observe ‘Carey Contours’ and de minimus agreements (made with adjacent cellular system operators/owners) when engineering coverage of cell sites that bordered other cellular ‘markets’ operated by a different company …
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ex-broadcast engineer says:
August 28, 2010 at 7:52 am
Some readers may not know that with AM, the whole tower radiates; it’s not just a support structure to get the active elements up high, like it is with FM…
With AM, the height has to do with the wavelength at the station’s frequency. Most (but not all) towers are nominally a quarter wave and have bare copper ground radials of the same length running out from the base every few degrees in a circular pattern, buried a few inches below the surface. Good ground conductivity is important; for example, a salt marsh makes an ideal location…
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Robert wonders if anybody has gone out to the field (yet! – it’s still daylight at that end of the country!) and salvaged all that ground wire buried aaround the tower? The copper grounding wires and Al towers will be worth more than the subdivision will be right now.
*IF* it hadn’t been pulled out already (yes, thieves in this area are already keen on what they can find in the ground near an AM broadcast facility).
As to the towers: steel, not Al. There may be a few Al towers out there, but I can’t recall dealing with anything of a commercial nature being anything but steel (there were a few manufacturers of Al towers for amateur/ham use at one time) …
A quick Google survey shows Al towers still available, but again, there are drawbacks to using Al.
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What I wouldn’t give to be able to run my 2m/70cm rig up to the top of that baby. Talk about reaching out and touching someone. And those poor, poor radomes and coax.
Though the XYL would have my head if I suggested a 250ft tower in the backyard. Unfortunately, all stealth at my house.