This man knows what radio towers are broadcasting—by looking at them

To most of us, radio towers are background objects, like telephone poles or cell phone towers. Catch one in a photo, and you’re likely to ignore it, or be upset that it’s ruined a pristine view. But for self-described “tower hunter” Chris Stelly, the tower is the view.

Stelly (no relation, he says, to the state’s Film and Television Office Director) can point to any radio tower in the 525-mile stretch between Houston and Pensacola and tell you what stations are broadcast on it.

During the week, the 27-year-old works as production manager at Lafayette TV station KADN Fox 15. But on weekends, he loads up his camera equipment and scouts the locations of radio towers all over the South, tracking them down to photograph them. Why? “I like to know where the signal is coming from,” he explains.

But he’s interested in much more than their appearance.

The obsession started early. As a child, Stelly suffered from severe, often life-threatening allergies, which required frequent trips to specialists all over the South. Although his family lived near Houston’s medical center, they would often have to travel to children’s hospitals in Dallas and New Orleans, sometimes twice a month. Long car rides, he says, left his parents scrambling for ways to entertain him, and eventually they presented him with a cheap boom box.

Stelly became fascinated with the differences in radio stations as they traveled down the road, swiveling his antenna to try to catch the clearest signals as they motored through towns along I-10. “I got really fascinated with the differences between the stations in Houston and the places we were traveling,” he says. He started bringing along blank tapes, dubbing hours of station broadcasts to listen to later. By the time he moved to Florida at age 12, Stelly had more than 2,500 tapes.

When he was old enough, he began hanging out at radio stations, learning the ropes. By the time he hit high school, he had a part-time job at KSMB in Lafayette. His work there led to an even more intimate understanding of what it took to get the signal from the station to listeners, and his fascination grew, as did his encyclopedic knowledge of what made a good broadcast.

These days, there’s no more boom box—Stelly has an electronic radio tuner that plugs directly into his laptop. A program called AudioHijack does the work previously achieved by analogue, recording the station output as mp3 files. Hours of re-tuning and antenna-adjusting later, Stelly settles down to his favorite part: listening.

Despite the homogenized nature of contemporary radio, like any connoisseur, he finds things to nitpick. How well do they vary their songs? Does the deejay talk to the audience, or does he just parrot station information? What kind of music rules the airwaves in each region?

He packs the bulky tuner whenever he travels, in order to scan and record the airwaves in every city he visits. “It’s like having a souvenir,” he says, grinning.

People often forget, Stelly says, that the massive structures tourists love to flock to are often used for practical purposes, like radio broadcasts.

But he never forgets. A trip to Paris yielded a recording snagged from the tip of the Eiffel Tower. In California, he caught airwaves broadcast from behind the iconic HOLLYWOOD sign. In Las Vegas, he targeted signals from Mount Potosi.

In a world that’s ephemeral by nature, Stelly has something to hang onto.