Trivandrum AIR Medium Wave Station - Silent

reubensm

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Heavy rain and strong winds lashed Trivandrum on Friday last week, leading to many old trees getting up-rooted. However the biggest casualty of the evening was the Medium Wave Transmission tower of All India Radio - Trivandrum. The 60 meter tall, 1973-errected tower, crashed to the ground and was completely destroyed. This tower, located near College of Engineering, Trivandrum was one of the landmarks of the city and was responsible for transmission covering Trivandrum and Kollam district (20 KW, Medium Wave). This is the very first time, in the station's history that they have service outage, since this tower was commissioned in 1973. The Trivandrum station, however, was commissioned much earlier, in 1937.

News bulletins have been flipped to the Vividh Bharti FM station which provides local Trivandrum coverage and a new tower is being brought in from Chennai. AIR says that transmissions will restart in a week, however the wait could be even longer. The cost for commissioning a new tower is around 5 crore.
 
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Picture of the fallen tower, from the local press:
Air%20tower%20-%20trivandrum_zpsowpuxvbn.jpg
 
I was in Kerala recently and I did come across a couple of people who very religiously listen to local MW and are very happy with it. Their world became silent with the demise. Hopefully they will get back their favorite channel soon. What is interesting is that the reception is very clear without all the harmonics that we come across when we try to listen to MW in bigger cities
 
Yes, I studied in Loyola School and used to watch this tower from the school campus every day. Was very sad to hear that it fell down and was destroyed. The transmission site was very old school and we used to have fun with crystal sets in school, since we were very near the tower.
 
It was an iconic tower, and was one of our survey target during engineering days. I still remember the height of the tower - 123m, which we used to derive using theodolite :)
 
Sorry I mentioned the tower height as 60 m, it was 122 m as reported in the press.

Since you've been looking at the tower closely, can you share some more details of how the Antenna was mounted to it, etc? Any pictures?
 
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