After generating global attention for its tower going missing, James Earley’s Oldies 1240 WJLX/101.5 W268BM Jasper AL has returned to the air as iHeartMedia has donated the HD3 of its 102.5 WDXB Pelham/Birmingham to feed the translator.
General Manager Brett Elmore shared, “iHeart reached out to learn more about the story and offered to help WJLX get back on-air and serving the Jasper community as soon as possible. They set us up on their iHeartRadio app and lent us one of their HD3 signals in Birmingham to get us back to our loyal Jasper audience. You’ll actually be able to hear “The Sound of Walker County” throughout North/North Central Alabama on 102.5-HD3!”
Elmore reported the theft of WJLX’s 200 foot tower earlier this month. However, as James Cridland, Wireless Estimator, and others have explained, many questions exist around the story as video evidence shows WJLX’s tower site in disarray for years with its electrical meter removed denoting it hadn’t had power and large brush and weeds growing through where supposedly the guy-wires had fallen days earlier. A message board user went a step further using Google Street View to show that the tower disappeared not in early February, but rather sometime between October 2022 and March 2023.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com