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Comment by dgrin91 | Hacker News Reader

How come they didn't notice that their service went dead when the tower was stolen?

The tweet says "a tower site" which implies they have others. It's entirely possible/likely that they have multiple towers for better coverage; if one went down they would lose some coverage area but not all of it.

It's an AM station, so they may also shut down overnight (as many small stations do to avoid over-propagation).

Off topic: I could have guessed that guy was a radio station manager without any context. There's just a look to them.

The tweet said that they took a crew with a bush hog ([1]) to "do early cleanup of the property before we do more work down there". So this was almost certainly a long-abandoned radio tower that they acquired and were planning to bring into service. The grass needs to be severely overgrown before you need a bush hog.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brush_hog

> The grass needs to be severely overgrown before you need a bush hog.

Use of a bush hug does not imply the need for a bush hog, though. Even for routine maintenance of the grass you're apt to choose the bush hog out of convenience and practicality. It's not like you're going to waste time puttering around with the push mower you cut your grass at home with for a tower site out in the middle of nowhere.

A single season of no maintenance in rural Alabama could easily allow the property to be full of Giant Hogweed[1] which seems to allow UV light to penetrate our skin a lot more easily, causing severe burns. Especially around a tower where birds roost and spread droppings for 100 feet around the area.

1. https://www.al.com/news/2018/07/giant_hogweed_plant_on_alaba...

Absolutely. One season of no maintenance in Alabama is enough for any property to be overgrown. Everything grows like weeds here, even pine trees

I used to mow the grass at an active radio station. I occasionally had to DR a path to each tower so they could do maintenance. They don't regularly mow the fields where the towers are, though Toro did occasionally come out and mow the whole thing as a test site for new mowers, which was neat.

I was hoping this was an actual hog, like the goats you can get to eat your lawn.

>There's just a look to them.

Yup I’ve got a face for radio as well.

based on the description this was an unattended repeater

It's covered in the article...

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