EJ Jurich
New Member
Here is a fun one. I was Chief Engineer at WROK in Rockford, Illinois. The studio and transmitters were at the same site in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Apparently, the city grew around what was once just a transmitter site. I took a call from a woman that lived in a house on the edge of the radio station property line. She tells me that for years the AM radio station would come out of their bedroom wall during the day, but not at night. Since it never bothered their sleep, she never said anything about it. However, they were getting ready to sell the house and wondered if I could do something about it. I'm thinking it just during the day because the AM is 5KW day, but 500 watts night. I stick a screwdriver in my back pocket and walk across the field to the house. It was really weird. Indeed, you could hear the AM coming out the wall and the quality was not that bad. I walked up to the wall, looked down and saw an electrical outlet. I asked if we could go to the basement under the location of the outlet. I could see a conduit going up the wall with a conduit coupling. I told her that if we are lucky, it will be here and not in the wall. I tightened the screws of the coupling. That was it, no more radio coming out of the wall. She said "you mean we put up with that all these years and all we had to do was tighten those screws?" I explained the metal conduit acted like an antenna. The loose screw was corroded and became a diode. The outlet attached to the wall made the wall a speaker.