Trunk Line

MEGO in journalism stands for My Eyes (or Ears) Glaze Over. According to William Safire , a MEGO os “a subject of great importance which resists reader interest.”

Infrastructure is a one-word MEGO.

So I haven’t written much about infrastructure, including here: on a blog created by Christain Sandvig when we were both fellows at the Berkman Klein Center. It was meant as a place where learned folk who care about infrastructure could hold forth. A variety of those was recruited to participate, and approximately none did, including me. I’ve kept it alive in recent years by posting here occasionally, mostly with stuff that I think fits better here than anywhere else I tend to write.

In the meantime, I have kept an active site on the topic going: a Flickr account with the name Infrastructure.  My chief interest there is in showing the plasticity of infrastructure over time: how it changes or gets replaced. I am especially interested in forms of infrastructure that are out of sight, mind, or booth, but on which we depend completely. These include water, gas, electricity, waste treatment… all the usual.

Plus broadcasting. Because that’s the form of infrastructure I know best, care about most, and see disappearing. Nobody else seems to be on this beat, so I’m stepping up.

“Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain,” John McPhee explains in a New Yorker essay that visits his compulsion to collect stray golf balls. I am likewise compelled to take pictures of transmitter sites. I came by my interest in transmitters when I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, observing the Manhattan Skyline from across swamps populated by dozens of transmitting towers for New York’s AM  radio stations. I loved radio and was so curious about the sources of signals that I would ride my bike down Route 17 (dangerous and dumb, but I survived) to WABC in Lodi, WINS in Lyndhurst, and WADO, WBNX, and WHN on Patterson Plank Road in Rutherford and Carlstadt. There I would gawk at the towers and sometimes knock on doors of the buildings feeding signals to the towers, so I could talk shop with the engineers who answered. The compulsion stayed with me. So, after I could drive, I visited countless other facilities, including mountaintop FM and TV stations.

But I didn’t begin shooting lots of photos of broadcast transmitters until digital photography became easy, along with publishing details about them. (One of the most active groups on Facebook is titled, no kidding, “I take pictures of transmitter sites.” It has over fifteen thousand members, most of which, I gather, are active or retired engineers like the ones I would visit as a kid.)

In the last few years, I’ve also come to realize that I’m documenting a medium in decline. Radio is being eaten on the music side by streaming (Apple, Amazon, Spotify, Pandora) and on the talk side by podcasting. Broadcast TV moved almost entirely from antennas to cable decades ago, and now cable itself is being replaced by subscription (aka “prestige”) video services. TV stations maintain transmitters mostly to satisfy “must carry” rules for cable. (Your station can’t be on cable if it’s not on the air.) So now my transmitter site photography has a documentary purpose: keeping up with what’s going down.

The example at the top of this post tells the story of one tower transmitting three of Santa Barbara’s AM stations: what broadcast engineers call a triplex on a monopole. Here’s what the tower looked like for most of its life, when it was 198 feet tall and proclaiming itself a landmark with bright red and white paint. And here’s what it looks like since December of last year, at just 128 feet tall, painted dark green to camouflage it among surrounding palm and eucalyptus trees. The tower now makes up for its lack of height with a flat 24-foot-wide X mounted on top like the candy on a lollypop. The tower was shortened because it was slightly bent. Twenty years ago, the tower would have been replaced or straightened.

Since the tower is now less efficient, the stations have adjusted their powers, mostly upward. Listeners, I am sure, can tell no difference. Nor did they notice when WBBM/780, Chicago’s alpha news station, dropped from its legacy status, running  50,000 watts full time, to 35,000 watts in the daytime and 44,000 watts at night. they did that so the station’s owner could sell off the land under the station’s transmitter sits. WBBM is now diplexed onto the tower of sister station WSCR/670.

The Santa Barbara stations are lucky that their tower stands a city equipment yard, consuming only a few square feet of space on the ground that’s not for sale. Countless other AM stations across the country have been going dark or operating with cheaper facilities. They do this because AM listening is declining while the value of land under many transmitter sites exceeds the worth of the signals. In the Santa Barbara case, the tower stands in the city equipment yard, taking up almost no room on the ground, and the shorter tower works almost as well as it did at full height. And, because it’s an example of AM’s growing unimportance, I keep shooting pictures of stations like these.

Among the reduced or deceased signals:

• WMEX/1510’s 50,000-watt facility
• WFNI’s 50,000-watt six-tower site in Indianapolis. (That link is to a 2019 Google Streetview of the site. Note the For Sale sign. It’s sold now, the station is off the air, and the land covered with buildings. It was, for most of its life, and at the time of its demise, the biggest AM station in Indiana. When I lived in North Carolina, it was one of the biggest signals one could get at night.)
• KABC/790’s and KHJ/930”s legacy transmitting sites in Los Angeles
• KOKC/1520’s original full-size towers (lost in a tornado and replaced with cheaper ones half as high and much less efficient)
• WDNC/620 in Durham and WKIX/850 in Raleigh, North Carolina, with land sold from under their old towers

Those are harbingers toward a time when AM is gone completely, as it already is in much of Europe. FM and TV are not far behind. But streams will remain, as the most popular radio already is the smartphone.

And I want to document as much of the change as I can.

By the way, I am also firing up this blog because it is also starting to show up in some RSS feeds. Greetings, feedsters!

Important: RSS is a hugely important source of Internet infrastructure. Dig:

Nothing with that many results can’t matter.