Weather Radio Tower Update: Still Waiting

Since February 2020 we have seen national emergencies from a deadly global pandemic to Russian cyberattacks (on top of previous infrastructure vulnerabilities) to a full blown coup attempt where the U.S. Capitol Building was sacked. We've gone through a tornado season and generally lived in a time where it'd be nice if our emergency weather radios would get us the information we need in the event we had to hunker down over weather or global catastrophe.

Our local NOAA radio tower has been down this whole time. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any definitive news of a replacement even a full year later.

The News-Gazette had an overview of recent updates on the weather radio tower that went down in February of 2020 and still hasn't been replaced with at a new tower location:

A report Monday from NOAA indicated that progress in restoring the service is “extremely slow because we need to find a new broadcast tower to put our equipment on.”

Negotiations that extended through summer and fall for a new tower site fell through...

The new transmitter will be located on a tower in Champaign, but not many are tall enough to do the job.

An announcement on weather.gov indicated officials at the highest levels of NOAA and National Weather Service, along with area congressional representatives, are working on the issue.

Full article here. The National Weather Service continues to have the same basic information:

The NOAA Weather Radio servicing the Champaign, IL area, including the campus of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, went offline on February 13, 2020. A damaged coaxial cable caused repeated outages and finally a full service outage. During the service restoration process, the previous tower space lease was cancelled by the owner, and thus a new transmitter location was required. A new tower location is being sought for a replacement transmitter and to increase reliability of the service in the future.

We will provide updates on the status of the Champaign NOAA Weather Radio transmitter as more information becomes available. This is going to be a very long process, so updates will only be posted about every 30-60 days. 

Why is it taking so long? 

NOAA must find a site and agreement that meets our technical, legal, and financial requirements. A potential lessor will have their own requirements. While we continue through the process, we encourage residents to have multiple ways to receive a warning including enabling wireless emergency alerts on your mobile phone, monitoring local broadcast media, and using trusted weather applications on your mobile phone.

Where are we now in the process of getting it back online? What’s next? 

The lease procurement process continues for a new tower location. After this process is completed and a lease for a new tower location is signed, a structural analysis will be done to ensure the tower can support our NOAA Weather Radio Transmitter antenna. Once the structural analysis is done, we will then execute the lease. Once the lease is executed, technicians will travel to Champaign and install the transmitter. The installation of the antenna and coaxial cable on the tower will be scheduled by the tower crew according to their schedule and the weather.

This isn't very encouraging since this is almost exactly, word for word, what we knew a year ago. From a Tom's Mailbag article in the News-Gazette back on February 28th, 2020:

“I reached out to the NWS to see if there were any possibilities of assisting them,” said Rick Finnie, associate director of technology for WILL. “The NWS is looking for a tower situation that would duplicate their current coverage and we are not able to satisfy their tower requirements.”

The National Weather Service at Lincoln web site says the “outage is due to a damaged coaxial cable, which connects the radio transmitter to the antenna. In addition, a new tower location must be secured to prevent future damage to cabling, which could result in additional future long-term outages. The station will remain offline as the National Weather Service works to relocate the weather radio transmitter to a new tower.

“We have started the process of identifying possible new tower locations for the transmitter. If you have a tower location suggestion, preferably within Champaign County, please contact NWS Lincoln Warning Coordination Meteorologist (WCM) Chris Miller at chris.miller@noaa.gov.

That full Mailbag article available here. I suppose if anybody knows of a possible new tower location, let them know.

Previous updates:

WCIA in September 2020: NWS tower installation pushed to 2021

WICS: Rep. Davis pushes NOAA to fix Weather Radio in Champaign, Piatt Counties

The last Cheat Sheet update on this tower situation was a false hope that it might be back up in 4-6 weeks back in June 2020.