Creaky Old Award Winning Bastard Technologist Infinitus Excellentia Ion Laser Dominatus
Join Date
May 2007
Location
A lab with some dripping water on the floor.
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Yeah, I got invited to go on a tower service call 2 years ago, as a guest. I watched a 60,000$ TDR/Network Analyzer locate the bullet holes on a UHF waveguide to within 6 inches. The same TDR was then used to check the studio transmitter link and a couple of abandoned antennas and cables on the 1200 foot tower. Beats climbing.
The local PBS station had pretty much abandoned their booster site on that tower, and the DTV changeover forced them to reuse the abandoned site.
The bullet holes on the TDR lined up with the heights of the lights on the tower.
The instrument was impressive, it located a few .223 holes in this stuff (pic from Jampro, inc) , 600 feet up.
Yes folks, your off the air TV comes from a piece of thick walled, silver plated, super expensive, copper furnace duct, for lack of a better word. Far less loss then a 3" diameter piece of coax cable.
Besides shooting the lights, a issue now is people trying to loot and steal the waveguides, often with the RF power "ON"
Steve
Last edited by mixedgas; 10-05-2010 at 08:13.
Qui habet Christos, habet Vitam!
I should have rented the space under my name for advertising.
When I still could have...
Really? Shooting the lights? God I'm glad I've got so much better stuff to do than that kind of ridiculousness.
And oddly enough if it was a large enough Waveguide and you sited through the bullet hole you could usually see it came from a bedroom window of a house. Their not even smart enough to shoot from a corn field or somewhere the could stay hidden.
I saved it, as I'm doing an installation for halloween with among other things, scary things in 3D via projections & HMD. This will be some of the content in the HMD. Stand on a milkcrate, strap the HMD on your head, & we'll put the fan near you, now see if you can watch it through to the end w/o falling down.
Ok, I've thought for a while that I would just love to be the guy that changes the light bulbs on these towers, but after seeing this video, I'm not sure.
It doesn't help at all that the camera is jerked all over the place by the motion of the guy's head.
More research necessary. We have three towers in the Portland area that are up in the hills, one of which I've dreamed of climbing for a while. I heard the penalties for climbing them without permission are quite steep, so I'm left with only the option of becoming a tower tech, which probably isn't going to happen.
Oh well, someday...
By the way, if any of you have a tower I can climb, I'm game. That looks awesome! I'll remake a PL edition of that video even.
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Originally Posted by ElektroFreak
