In this letter to the editor, the author replies to our story “Have You Been Hit by Copper Theft?” Radio World welcomes letters to the editor on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.
It has been about 12 years since my four-tower 1300 array was hit by copper thieves. This event had the best possible outcome.
I got the local FBI office involved since this is a federally-licensed facility and active EAS participant.
The local police detectives were diligent in their work. They found the scrapyard where the copper was cashed in. They were able to identify the person that cashed in the copper and before long the perp was arrested while burglarizing a business not far from the transmitter site.
This is where the FBI took over the prosecution. They needed some solid evidence that the theft massively affected the performance of this federally-licensed facility.
Our audio logger was logging the station from the modulation monitor at the site. The audio is returned to the studio location of the recorder via licensed IP radios. We could clearly see on the logger audio envelope levels that, over three nights, the modulation envelope was shrinking.
On the final night, it took a very large dive in transmitter RF envelope output. The solid-state transmitter faulted back to a very low power, about 300 watts. This is a 5,000 watt regional AM.
I was able to provide the FBI with the obvious demonstration of decreased modulation envelope. The logger also told us exactly what time the copper was being systematically removed. It was occurring in the wee hours of the morning. I still have the screenshots of the decreasing RF envelope and audio level.
The Evidence: Here is one PDF that has multiple pages of progression. It starts on 2-24-12 with a normal operational logger screenshot. It shows later in the afternoon on 2-24-12, the thievery began in broad daylight at that isolated site.
He returned the 25th at 0130 under cover of night and took more copper. That pretty much killed the counterpoise making transmission and modulation difficult. The Gates 5 transmitter was not “happy” with this at all. It had faulted to the lowest power level (500 watts) and the inefficiency of the array only allowed it to radiated a couple hundred watts. It is a 5000 watt station. We did receive complaints from listeners.
Later PDF screenshots beginning on 8-3-2012 show the results of repair efforts and the restoration of the full modulation envelope.
There was a brief period when I turned the transmitter off (last screenshot) because the last repair was a little too hot to do while the transmitter was on the air.
These are from a Telos profiler audio logger. The screenshots are of the audio files in Adobe Audition. The dates and times are at the top of the page. These are the “evidence” the FBI and fed prosecutors used to convict the thief.
The prosecution was in federal court — not a local, county or state court. If it had been in a local court, the thief would have likely gotten six months to a year in jail … if even that much. In federal court, the thief was found guilty by the preponderance of evidence and admitted to taking the copper. He was found guilty and sentenced to 11 years in a federal pen.
I did emergency repairs with #4 stranded copper wire. I replaced all of the copper strapping with that stranded wire and had to resolder all of the ground radials to that copper wire. The repairs took a couple days and overnights. The #4 stranded copper wire brought the array impedance back to 50 ohms. The station was able to operate at full power again. I took field readings with an FIM a reasonably short distance from the array in the major lobe.
When I first measured it it was woefully low at about 3 millivolts per meter. After the emergency repair, the readings were up in the thousands of millivolts. This was not a designated proof point, so I did not have any numeric comparison to what it originally was, but the increases with every day’s repair efforts were testament enough for me.
A later run of all field monitor points demonstrated compliant performance with the numbers being very close to the previous set of field readings.
The copper wire was never replaced with strap as the original 1949 design specified. Upper management decided that a lower revenue AM was not worth the large investment to replace all of the copper strap. It still runs in compliance with that arrangement today.
— Gary Zocolo, Chief Engineer & IT Support Specialist, Radio-One, Cleveland, Ohio
[Related: “Letter: Copper Thieves Love a Remote Tower Site“]
