Welcome to the wonderful world of KCLF-AM, 1500 in New Roads, Louisiana. It's another fine example of the quality engineering some station owners, managers and engineers will practice so that they can squeeze that last dime into the bottom line. (This is NOT intended to be a "slight" at anyone in particular but, since this practice is still alive and well after two full years of counseling this particular licensee against these practices, we're giving up and hoping he can pay his own N.A.L.' s out of this station!)

KCLF-AM was evicted from it's former tower during 1998 due to non-payment of rent. This "setup" was the design of the station's former engineer in an effort at getting the station back on the air. These arrangements went unchanged until February of 2001 when we built a 100 foot "temporary tower" approximately 1/4 mile from the tower from which the station was evicted (more about this a bit later).

Fortunately, Mike Patton (of Mike Patton & Associates in Baton Rouge) had enough sympathy to help the poor soul build the long-wire antenna setup in the following pictures. The thing was well tuned and, had anyone bothered to submit a request for Special Temporary Authority, the station could've actually been legal (for a set length of time) with this operation... But, that didn't happen...

This station was actually using a wire run up the side of a telephone pole as a main antenna! (The tower was added by us as a support for the STL antenna which sends audio to the newly constructed tower three miles north of this location.)

The dangling wire on the right (emerging through the white ceramic insulator) was the station's primary antenna and was not in any way, shape or form protected from human hands! A small child could've very easily reached up and grabbed this "hot" antenna.

The 1 kW. signal reached almost 8 miles in some directions! 

There was some top loading! (Actually, this worked more as a the horizontal portion of a "long-wire"...)

OK, so some idiot left the camera set up for "short range" pictures and snapped the next few "long range" shots...

Of course, my two "monkeys" (Danielle and Kendall) had to pose...