Thieves steal 200ft structure from Alabama radio station

Two issues to me;

- No instrumentation of the broadcast, ie, responses to calls; receivers, even an individual listener, or the recorder listening at a given point. Your SLI for a terrestrial broadcast shouldn't be "a landscaper told me it was gone"

- Lack of business insurance. a $100,000 item that is imperative to your business seems like something that should be insured. Especially, if you don't have nearby site security, or live in a location that has hurricanes, and tornados.

I enjoy the comments that suggest a helicopter stole it for scrap metal because the fuel, flight time, and ground coordination would be significantly complex.

I theorize it wasn't a theft, but some party the poultry plant / city / county believed it was derelict, a safety issue, and an eyesore; And that nobody knew who to contact in a timely manner to have it removed.

This is the tower on Google Street View: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.821395,-87.274311,3a,49.7y,1... As this one is indeed next to the MarJac poultry farm that the station owner mentioned in his Facebook post [1]. I notice that the tower is right next to the "Jasper Street Department" site which has big signs warning the site is under video surveillance. So hopefully they caught something no camera.

[1]: https://www.insideradio.com/free/an-entire-200-foot-tower-st...

Wow this rates right up there with thieves in the ex-USSR ripping up copper cabling along railroad tracks and elsewhere.

File under "weird crimes of theft in sclerotic economies".

More discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39302045

Paywall: https://archive.is/OeM3v