How to silence commercial radio

There are times when I feel guilty at laughing and the news that Lanarkshire's L107 radio station has its £50,000 transmitter stolen while it was on the air is one of them.

According to the Daily Record newspaper two thieves were spotted by CCTV cameras wheeling it away from the 17th floor of an office block in Hamilton, just after the station fell silent at noon on the 30th April 2010. Mike Smith's Log In To Lunch show was being broadcast was being broadcast at the time. The transmitter about is the size of a large fridge.

The station was taken over earlier this year after claims that former major shareholder Alan Shields had failed to pay creditors and DJs, which makes one wonder if this was not a theft at all but maybe the employees of the communications company that supplied the transmitter collecting their gear that they had not been paid for. If it was thieves I hope they got severe RF burns disconnecting the antenna.

The article in the Record says the station broadcasts to a potential audience of 600,000 but the fact that the station has been in financial difficulties may indicate the audience might be somewhat smaller. In which case it was a good job their listener was tuned in or they might not have realised for weeks. There are certainly lots of this type of commercial FM station that if they vanished tomorrow no-one would notice.