KNBR (AM 680) Antennas, Redwood City, CA, 2024
All the pixels, less risk of electrocution or falling, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/54131419266
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Note, important safety tip: you can get closer to this tower without clearly trespassing or jumping fences than most other 50KW broadcast antennas I've encountered. I measured a field strength of over 80V/m a bit outside the tower fence, which is an incredibly strong signal (though still within OSHA limits at the frequency involved).
Resist any temptation to jump the fence and climb the (energized) tower. You'd be electrocuted as soon as you touch it.
AM broadcast is a technically interesting and somewhat endangered medium. The low frequencies mean that signals routinely travel well beyond their local coverage areas, especially overnight in winter. So there's a bit of mystery in tuning around the dial late at night; you never know what you might pick up.
Sadly, industry consolidation and the growth of higher bandwidth media (FM, satellite, podcasts) has greatly reduced the variety and local focus of programming. But it somehow hangs on.
The rapid decline of local content on the mediumwave bands has considerably reduced the romantic mystery of tuning around and seeing what you find. It's mostly now a sterile mix of mass-produced, syndicated right wing talk, sports, and so on. But there are still a handful of stubbornly local stations producing their own programming.
@[email protected] The graveyard still produce a glorious at night...and this past winter I spent some time Sunset Skipping...and can still hear some local daytime stations in Virginina/Tennesee/North Carolina playing country gospel with local small business ads from my QTH in Brooklyn...but not like it used to be.
@[email protected] I can regularly (in summer, overnight) receive identifiable stations on all but 11 of the MW slots. A few gems in there, but also a lot of monotony. And yes, the local ads are often the best part!
@mattblaze "produce a glorious mush" that is
@mattblaze Also I miss the clear channel (the band allocation, not the company) overnight Trucker shows. The Road Gang from WWL New Orleans was my favorite.
@pirateradiomap and WWVA’s overnight trucking show.
@[email protected]
With Big John Trimble! My favorite though was Big John Parker, the weekend guy on the Road Gang...he was what I like call to a "cornball nihilist" He'd come up with these crazy pranks for the truckers to do...like look for the missing hour during the change back to standard time. And he would record the truckers who would call in and then he'd edit the tape to make them say weird things.
@mattblaze And he was a collector of vintage country music on Sunday mornings between 4-6 AM he had a specialty show called "Country Music the Way It Used to Was." I"d stay up all night to tape it and would switch over the WRVA to catch The Silver Star Quartet an old school Black Gospel harmony group doing request sfor people who were getting up for church. Caught a few of those on tape.
@mattblaze
I've probably got about 100 hours worth of the Road Gang on cassette...a digitization project I should get to post haste given I recorded them in the mid-late 80s.
@pirateradiomap Oh, that definitely needs to b e online!
@[email protected] Yeah! I've got some digitizied...I'll try to put them up soon.