A random, roundabout shoutout to Greensboro
Doc Searls, editor of Linux Journal and co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," frequently posts photos he has taken from airplanes and asks readers of his blog to guess where they were taken. One of his more recent was of the array of transmitter towers south of Charlotte, very near where I grew up, used by WBT-AM. (I recognized the shot immediately, having flown in and out of Charlotte/Douglas International many times; you pass just east of the towers when taking off toward or approaching from the south, where the main runways face.)
WBT (1110) is one of the few remaining clear-channel stations in the U.S. -- that is, no other station broadcasts on that same frequency. AM radio signals, which bounce off the ionosphere and back down to Earth, can travel enormous distances after dark if there's no interference (sunlight limits their reach), and WBT's signal, staticky though it might be, covers much of the East Coast between sunset and sunrise.
You'd have to be an old-time radio geek to know why these towers are so interesting, and I won't bore you with the gory technical details. But for our purposes, Searls gives a shoutout to WBT's corporate parent, Jefferson-Pilot, for restoring the two towers that were knocked down by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, even though the company could have approached the damage in other ways ... and for not selling its broadcast outlets, which include some of this state's first, biggest and most respected, to one of the corporate behemoths now buying up stations nationwide.
