North Dakota: Land of Tall Towers

Part of the Fall Trip 2009

Eastern North Dakota is farm country. People there grow everything from wheat (and lots of it) to sugar beets to corn and alfalfa. It's good land, flat, cheap, and sparsely populated—and there's a lot of it. For broadcasters looking to cover this enormous area in the pre-satellite era—the television market stretches over 200 miles from southern Manitoba to the South Dakota line—there were few economical choices other than building very tall towers. That is why North Dakota became home to what were for many years the tallest and second-tallest structures in the world. They were, for a bit over a decade, eclipsed by a broadcast tower in Warsaw, which failed in 1991, and have since been eclipsed again by a huge monument to oil wealth in the UAE, Burj Dubai.

One of these towers, the KVLY-TV (11/44 Fargo) tower, remains the tallest structure in the United States, at 2,063 feet. The KXJB (4/38 Fargo) tower, about five miles away, is three feet shorter. Other stations in the area also have tall towers, in absolute terms, but they are significantly shorter than those two: WDAY-TV (6/21 Fargo) is 1,205 feet, its satellite WDAZ-TV (8 Devils Lake) is 1,461 feet, and Fox sisters KVRR (15/19 Fargo), KBRR (10 Thief River Falls, Minn.), and KNRR (12 Pembina) are 1,101, 750, and 1,438 feet, respectively. You'll find photos of all of them except KNRR (I never made it up as far as Pembina, although it's historically important as the birthplace of Canada's Global network) below, along with miscellaneous FMs and two of Prairie Public TV's stations.

We begin, actually, on the east side of the Red River, in Euclid, Minnesota, at what looks to all appearances to be a large AM directional array….