This radio tower fries frogs! 

Imagine you touch it and the last thing you hear is a mattress commercial beamed straight into your head.

The worst smell I have ever experienced: Dealing with a squirrel that shorted the 1kW tower I worked on - it had stepped across the lightning arrester!

I wouldn't go near that thing wearing a pacemaker

Drove up to the gate of a remote tower where we were renting space. As I was unlocking the gate, I could hear Spanish music very clearly. It was coming out of the 4 inch fence post that wasn't capped.

50 KW is small when you compare it to the old VOA 1000 KW transmitters used during the Cold War. In Okinawa the nearby villagers got free electric lights. All they had to do was take naked florescent tubes near the antenna fence and then back to their homes. The tubes would stay lit, and they placed the tubes in the closet when they wanted lights out. The transmitter ran 23 hours each day, so they had to relight the tubes each day.

People be complaining about 5G towers.

Today learned you can use frogs as a 10kW fuse

IT TURNS THE FREAKING FROGS GA-No wait wrong one, this turns em in jerky.

I heared a story about a guy who coiled kilometers of wire around his house to harvest the energy from a nearby radio station in east germany. 😂

People nearby with metal bed springs can hear the radio station in their mattress if it’s quiet enough

me: trying to sleep The pots and pans in my cupboards: Vibin

Back in the 80’s, I worked in a building housing two small AM radio transmiter, one had 2 KW and the other 16KW. The 16KW still had a pretty high voltage for the final stage, about 5.5 kV. One night, while everything was working fine, the large transmitter protection decided to shut it down. We tried to restart but it never connected the final stage. After a few minutes of troubleshooting, we found a carbonized mouse on a high voltage capacitor, it decided to jump from the chassis which was grounded to the positive terminal of the capacitor and met his maker. Good times.

*KMOX-AM (1120 kHz) is a 50,000-watt clear-channel AM radio station with studios located in downtown St. Louis, MO, USA. But their broadcast tower is located about 10 miles northeast, in Pontoon Beach, IL.*

Putting the 'kill' in kilowatt.

AM radio was awesome. You could slowly microadjust the dial and find all kinds of stations from all over the place.

Here in Germany, we had just fivehundred meters from my house a station with 1200 kW (Yes 1.2 MW) transmitting the Europawelle Saar. And just an hour with the car away was the station of Radio Luxembourg, also known as Radio 208, which was also transmitting with 1.2 MW. And if you are looking for the longwave, 20 Minutes by car and you were able to visit the Station of Europe 1, transmitting with 2,000 kW (2 MW) on 183 kHz.

Got it. If we ever get into an apocalypse that's where I need to go to become a radio host for the apocalypse

In Poland we had a 650 meter radio tower which had 2 transmitters each 1000 KW. It was located in Konstantynów and if the weather was nice polish radio 1 could be recieved even as far as Egypt.

Are used to listen to it over in Germany when I was a radio operator over there in the US Army in their mid-1970s

That was the most flawless loop I have seen, good job sir, commendable!

Check out the history of WLW 700 am in Cincinnati. Before the FCC it was way way over 50,000 watts.

My friend works at a local water supply station. They have a pigeon that managed to catch itself between 10 kW wires. It’s been there for 5 years, and no one dares to take it out.

I used to live next to a little unknown village in England where they had experimental Marconi radio equipment that would reach Australia. It was used to contact submarines and was a nuclear attack target throughout the cold war. The towers were gigantic. They've all disappeared now. There's another massive radio tower nearby that can be seen from hundreds of miles away.

Remind me of the old raccoon transformer incident I had... Homeboy got barbecued and he just stayed there until he wasn't there anymore 😂

That's a class act right there!

Meanwhile in Hungary we have Kossuth on 540kHz broadcasting with 2MW(megawatts,2000kW 😂)

one time i saw a squirrel that had touched the live part of the powerline and it was literally petrified exactly how it was when it died. just a rock solid piece of fried squirrel fur and all

Grew up with this on my dad’s truck radio, and I live in St. Louis so the signal was crisp, for AM that is

I don't mean to downplay how cool managing 50 thousand watts is, but maybe it's worth mentioning there are hundreds of AM stations at this wattage around the US. I think the wattage was capped (by the Federal government) back in the thirties with the idea of preventing monopolization by watt escalation. The highest watt AM station in America is said to be 450,000 watts. That's because the Caribbean island of Bonaire (belonging to The Netherlands) is classified as in North America. I could never hear this station because there are much closer 50,000 watt stations, like within 10 miles, on the same frequency.

Another long range one was 1190 wowo. Diring ww2 fort wayne indiana was on a list of top ten places to bomb because of WOWO and our defense industry centered around Magnavox. Grandfather was stationed in france, and said he listened every night to home!

My neighbor is a radio expert he was transmitting a signal that cut off local stations and caused a few cop cars to catch fire. This was years and years ago...

Seeing this makes me realize i just have a disassembled radio tower in my backyard just laying around

That’s a lot of power. As a HAM radio operator I can only legally do 1,500 watts on most bands

Art bell had 4, look him up, if you know you know, coast to coast from Pahrump Nevada! Many roswells😊

No wonder I got shocked from the slide in the playground

*the frogs hated that.*

There used to be a radio station in Ft. Wayne Indiana called WOWO that pumped 50K watts. Was heard at quite a distance from the source.

That poor little frog though!

I grew up in a little town called Bunker Hill, Il. St. Louis was our back doorstep. This was such a cool video to watch for me! KMOX has always just been, but now I really appreciate how powerful that station’s signal really is! And I’ve been a ham radio operator since 2010! Also I still live in the area, though a bit further from St. Louis…

I grew up near the WGN Chicago AM 720 radio station I believe it's 50k watts as well.

Long live AM radio!

50 kW is nothing here in Europe. Like someone else mentioned, on 540 KHz we have Kossuth Radio from Hungary with 2.000.000 Watts and I pick it up near Frankfurt Germany like the station is in my backyard. That is 1200 km as the crow flies.

I can't even get local stations in the mountains 😂 😂 😂 were definitely not getting a signal where I live 😂 😂

Ham radio operators are like; HOLD MY BEER

That loop tho

Radio antennas are super cool and far more deadly than people realize.

There was a Mexican radio station called Radio Cañón in Monterrey Mexico and I could hear it at night in Denver, they advertised 100,000 wats of power.

London has the famous crystal Palace Tower. It had the power of over 1MW that serves all of London and much of the south east England

That's pure QRP right there 😅

WLS Chicago was too.

This is awesome! We need more radio subsidies to preserve important pieces of tradition like this. Long live analogue media!

The tower of death indeed

A good motto for this tower would be " frying brain cells for almost a century"

I (dumba**) once climbed a small tower. Saw really heavy cables dangling along the side of it, all the way up. Creeped me out wondering if any of them possible chaffed through the insulation. The fact that the gate arcs on itself... How do you even know whats safe to touch when working on that thing? Lol

Just got to love the frequency range AM/MW is in due to its propagation at night (in the states we just call it by its modulation mode (AM = amplitude modulation), many people outside the USA call it "Medium wave" for the band it's using), some nights are better than others due to atmospheric conditions, but at night it's always going to travel further at night, I almost always hear AM/MW stations from NY, Canada at night. And I can definitely pick up KMOX AM at night, it's usually pretty easy with the big boomers/clear channel stations that don't have to lower their power at night. FM broadcast can have a similar effect but due to the frequency FM broadcast uses it's better suited for the day time, and if the atmospheric conditions are right even FM can go quite far (either Sporadic E skip, or Tropospheric ducting). A while ago I heard an FM station that's located in Texas and I was in Ohio at the time, at first I thought it was a new station then it faded out.

That is one powerful boi.

I took apart some of the old 10KW, 6 tower Insane Broadcasting site on the other side of the woods from that site a couple of months ago. I've heard that the sites were only put that close together because the original engineer lied on the soil conductivity report, and I believe it! There was so much RF backfeeding into the tower shake that I couldn't hardly touch anything. BTW, have much trouble with the 3DX? I dispise those things.

I'm looking forward to the full video!

Strong AM radio stations have a long range because the relatively low frequency allows the signal to bounce off the ionosphere and be reflected back down. At night, the ionosphere thins out and is therefore higher which makes the reflected signal bounce back to earth farther away.

Free energy

Read about polish radio station in konstantynów. It was highest human made structure, before burj khalifa. The signal could be received from US or even China.

I've managed to get American stations on my 1950's radio here in Sweden, also stations from asia and all europe that still transmit shortwave, mediumwave/AM and longwave signals. So yes, those transmitters are powerful.

The gate and the fence are supposed to bonded to the earthing system. That is a safety issue by code.

And Art Bell

AM radio towers are are completely electrified if you arc it at the bottom you can here the radio signal through the arc! Also when climbing them you can't step onto the tower you have to jump all at once or you risk electrocution. Check out a video called 'AM radio tower power' on RU-vid

They should ground the fence and all parts near the tower to disipate the current

Smooth transition

During the great sask power outage, I think I heard this station... nothing up here was on the air :D

On channel 6 on the CB radio they're running that much power.50k. ✌️🇺🇸

Should call it the frog frier

Its in Shrewsbury. One of the most historically significant radio towers in existence.

Love to hear thoughts on the future of AM and the possibility of AM digital. I've heard "some" electric cars are too noisy for AM because "someone" cut corners. That's the rumor anyway. I haven't seen data on it.

"Famous voices like...Rush Limbaugh" 💀

Now I have the mental image of a frog being fried to death while its whole body acts like a speaker for Rush Limbaugh.

Meanwhile somewhere in the USA is a tweaker salivating about all of the copper tubing and how to get it without getting fried.

Bill was so happy he could tune in on epstine island

This tower gets partial blame for Rush Limbaugh.

Listened to the KMOX radio broadcast of one of the 1985 World Series games in Washington DC. It has a broad reach and especially at night when it reflects easily off of the ionosphere.

I tuned a portable radio to 1120AM here in Minnesota and pointed the antenna towards St. Louis. I picked up a noisy, unintelligible signal with the tone and timing of a person talking. I’m guessing it was either KMOX or KCRN which has another 50 kw tower in Colorado. Kinda cool either way. Maybe I’ll try taking my little radio somewhere with less interference tonight and see what I can pick up.

The fact that it helped bring Rush Limbaughs show to am radio ads value to that transmitter tower. I miss Rush Limbaugh I remember when Rush was on TV.

Saddest death of a frog must have been: to be fried by the amplified “famous voice” of Rush Fucking Limbaugh.

700 WLW near Cincinnati used to transmit at 500kW and people near the tower could hear it in their bathtubs, toilets, and apparently even teeth fillings!

There used to be a 500K tower in Oklahoma. I don't remember the radio station, I just remembered they played country. They had an FM Tower too, but it was tiny.

omg that's far range

Did you know that sunspot activity and the alignment of planets in our solar system affect how far and clear a radio signal can be broadcast? Yes, astrology is real, for radiowaves.

Makes a great landmark flying around the area!!!!

50,000 unstoppable watts!

Thank god rush Limbaugh is twisting in the deepest pits of hell

That’s nothing pal, here in Droitwich UK, we got half million watts 😂

I grew up in StL, and one year we were on vacation in the middle of Montana and at night we listened to KMOX.

The stress on "fiiiifty thousand" made me LOL! Most MW transmitters are in the range of 100kW to 2MW.

The perfect loop doesn't EXiiii......😮

Radio waves travel farther at night, just like sound. This is why it can be detected farther at night.

It could probably send dangerous waves through your body.

Vers mon ancien domicile, il y a un centre d'émission pour les sous marins et lors de l'amenagement du grenier, on a constaté que 10 m de fil suffisait à avoir les tubes fluo en permanence lumineux 🤔 Plusieurs pylones relié par des longs fils, des amplis refroidis a l'eau de chauffage des batiments, etc

Nothing like the 500kw towers🙂

Rush limbaugh was a cancer to humanity, this is a great piece of radio history tho.

Isn't it amazing how much curvature the radios waves have to go around to make it that far?! O wait, um......

Don't forget the master, Art Bell!

can we not put rush limbaugh and jack buck in the same league. one was the voice of the cardinals. the other is the voice of the klan.