Comm Tower Photos

[manross]

30yrs ago before anyone payed attention to RF safety, I had to fetch a ham antenna from the top of a 200ft or so FM broadcast tower on Cheyenne Mountain, CO with no safety harness and all my tools stuck in the pockets of my pants. The FM transmitter was 20kw into a 4 bay antenna and I remember banging on the fiberglass radomes of the antennas when I climbed by them while they were on air at full power. On the way back down (climbing with an antenna in my arms, no ropes, no harness) the aluminum antenna got quite warm in my hands when I passed by the broadcast antennas.
prcguy

I was up there a few years ago and it has grown significantly over the past 30 years. That ham tower is probably still there and many more. With all of the power coming off that mountain, I was feeling a little paranoid walking around up there for certain parts of my body... :lol:

 

[af5rn]

Brutal. I don't know how close I would have been getting to that stuff though. Not very.

The key with the ice is having it all slowly freeze and melt at the same rate. If it does that, it often strengthens then dissipates uniformly. Then you can sometimes get away with no damage. But when it starts to break up non-uniformly, that's when it starts breaking stuff... You get chunks left on the ends and that unbalanced weight is what starts tearing stuff up.

Seriously. I used to work some at a radio shop, which was a metal building at the very base of a 500 foot tower. Being Texas, they obviously didn't give a lot of thought to ice and snow when they built this site. I remember the first time we got a good ice storm. Two days later, as the ice started melting, huge daggers of ice came plunging through the roof of the office and shop. We had to close for days because it was too dangerous to even get near the place!