OK, but you are talking a LOT of money, above the cost of engineers survey. add space rent that would be tripple conventional site rent.
for the end cost, putting up your own site and tower would be far cheaper.
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Antenna for cell tower mounting
- Thread starter difultonhoward
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for the end cost, putting up your own site and tower would be far cheaper.
What are you taling about. Any site you go on will cost for engineering and IM studies, structurals and other associated costs. . Doesn't matter if it has cell, public safety or business lmr. Building a new site costs 100's of thousands of dollars now, as well as insurance and other costs associated with owning a tower site. Why do you think many agenices colo on existing towers. We aren't talking about putting your rohn 25 in your backyard here.
Many of us have been asking the same question for quite some time now.
mmckenna
I ♥ Ø
Merlin,
When you are down deep in the hole, it's usually a good idea to stop digging.
The ham/hobby radio guessing game that people play when the subject of commercial systems comes up gets pretty silly on this site. Those of us that currently work in the field can easily see that you don't know what you are talking about and you are just guessing. So, maybe a bit of advice: Stop. Just. Stop.
as for the OP;
@difultonhoward if all this noise hasn't chased you off, there are some of us here that are currently in the industry and would be happy to give you some guidance. But you'll need to filter out the hobby/ham radio BS. Unfortunately this is one of the challenges with asking for professional assistance on a hobby radio site. There's just too much noise from those that want to help, but don't have the knowledge.
If you are still here, it might be best to open a new thread, or pick a few of us and send a direct message. We're always happy to help.
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Our local Fire Department ask about rent on a 150 foot monopole and was told $2900 a month plus building plus our own electric meter.
who’s property is it on. In my experience, most tower companies will offer public safety a free spot as part of the agreement with the property owner/ zoning agreements. Might be worth a look down that avenue.
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Government Right of Way
They found another option
They found another option
Check with the branch of GOV, that may be in their agreement already.
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There was not any
Holy crap! My rent at 300ft on the tower I’m going on is only going to be $200 a month and they waived a lot of the normal fees they have too. $2,900 a month for only 150ft (provided they even let you put it that high) is asinine. Someone wants to be laughing all the way to bank at that price! Unless it is a dang popular site that a bunch of carriers want to be on. Guess I don’t know how urban of a site this is. Mine is pretty rural.
There is 350ft site near me that is owned by SBA. It used to have a cellular company on it but they moved to a different nearby tower owned by ATC. The SBA tower sat with just the tower lights on it for about 4 years. Today the only thing on it that was just put up in the spring is an antenna for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. I do have to wonder what they are charging the CPRR for rent.
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We are a town of 12,000 and the monopole is owned by a cell provider. I know in Nashville a provider offered a land owner near Bridgestone Arena $5000 a month for a spot 50x50 for a monopole.
My goodness! $5,000 a month is a crazy to think about! But I guess beings that it is Nashville I can’t be surprised either though but wow!
$2,900 a month still seems plenty high the possibility of a max of 150ft for a city of 12,000. Especially when it’s for emergency services. Kind of rotten of them to want that much from you considering from the sounds of it usually companies try to give emergency services a better deal. It’s not like you’re a business making a profit off of it. Someone was definitely being greedy.
Welcome. Please let us know what your existing antenna system consists of, the existing antenna height, and the location in reference to your campus. From your UHF T-Band frequency listed as 495-500 MHz and the Piedmont info, it looks like you are possibly within 50 miles of the Washington DC and Virginia area.
The 5G cell tower "pole" seems to be a monopole structure which would need a platform or a chain mount for your antenna at the 100 foot height. Both are not inexpensive. Yes, one antenna mounted on the side at 100 feet will definitely have a dead zone shadow caused by the 2-3' wide monopole.
When two omnidirectional antennas are combined together to work around a physical obstruction like a monopole, it will make the radio coverage much more complex.
Where the communication coverage area can only see one of the two omnidirectional antennas due to the monopole obstruction, the communications will be good but with reduced range since the "splitter" will divide the available power in half for all receive and transmit signals.
Where the communications coverage area can see some part or all of the two omnidirectional antennas, the communications may be good due to the signals possibly adding together or could be very very bad with the two signals completely cancelling each other out due to being out of phase/delayed to each other.
Think of it as dropping two pebbles into a still pond of water. See the water images below. Where the high spot of the water ripples meet, you will have an increase. Where the low spots of the water ripples meet, you will have a severe decrease.
Overall, it would be best to install one antenna on the very top of the monopole to keep the communications coverage simple, effective, and at full power. Just like dropping one pebble into a still pond of water, a very simple pattern that radiates out without any interference from other ripples. However you will become the sacrificial lightning rod being on the very top and will need a robust antenna to survive lightning hits.
If you absolutely must use the 100-foot monopole height, another choice would be to use up to 4 directional antennas that cover a specified sector like N, S, E, and W so that there is minimal signal coverage overlap that could cause problems.
In the Willis Tower (Sears Tower) located in Chicago, some radio systems do not use the outside roof top with a single antenna and instead use directional panel antennas in the perimeter glass windows on the 100 through 109 floor levels above ground. Each floor of radio equipment measures approximately 50x75 feet in size and radio coverage is only needed North, West, and South. So 3 directional (90 degree coverage) panel antennas are combined together using one panel antenna per window per direction. Radio coverage over Lake Michigan to the East is not needed. The 3 combined panel antennas do have some overlap which causes signal reductions/phase cancellations in the Southwest and Northwest directions which just happens to follow two main expressways! A definite palm to forehead moment!
I hope that this information is helpful.
Best Regards
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The club I belong to owns a 60m tower with the anchor tenant being a cellular provider. When the cell provider added new, unauthorized microwave equipment, we forced them to do exactly that.
Had they not, they would have been removing their unauthorized equipment, at their cost, and it would have jeopardized their tenancy(violated their contract) had they not complied. The other option was shutting down their gear, try to fill the gap in coverage with a SOW on someone else's property, until they could negotiate a new location, construct a site and commission it.
They are still colo'd on our site, and now that the wrinkles are worked out, it's a fantastic relationship with them.
On real sites, with owners that take that **** seriously, this is how it is done.
Structural and wind loading studies WITH a PE stamp on the drawing and calculations. IM study. Tower riggers that have valid WCB insurance. Valid liability insurance for their gear. Their own power.
Our other tenants are using club owned antennas, as such, we monitor SWR and power output. To proactively catch problems with our feedlines and antennas. We are responsible if an antenna and feedline fail for those tenants.
This isn't some POS 30m Tryon in someone's back yard.
Another club I was a part of, wanted to add a second feedline, and remove a diplexer at their antennas. The site owner required a structural study done to determine if the tower could handle the additional feedline. They ended up being gifted an abandoned run of 7/8" hardline, that was shortened, terminated and brought to their antennas(the run went much higher up the tower). We paid riggers to do this work, who were also doing g other work for the tower owners at the same time they also replaced the clubs damaged, existing hardline.
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Don't forget that when you have three individual antennas facing different directions you have to split the power to each antenna and for three antennas it will be roughly 33% of the power to each antenna or direction. You would want some antenna gain to make up for splitter losses when antennas are not combined in phase to cover the same area.
