Posted: 4/1/2017 10:43:54 AM EDT
100 ft of Rhon 55 & 5 antennas busted all to hell. Its one of the towers at a contest station owned by a friend. I got a bunch of fotos for his insurance company. As soon as I get the "go ahead" I start stripping and salvaging what I can. Might save a couple tower sections and a few elements plus some of the guys and philli-strand but everything else is pretty much junk.. Well it will be a few days worth of work and he'll probably go up with another tower so there's another week getting it up and new antennas mounted. Maine winters..Wind and ice.. Hard on towers... ..AMA.. 73 |
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The failure (IMHO) was caused by a couple things.
1.Too many big antennas on one tower. A couple of them were linear loaded 40M in a phased array. Those puppies are huge.. boom length is roughly 30 feet. 2. We had a winter mix storm and ice load was heavy coupled with 50 MPH winds in a Nor'easter took its toll. It appears as though the steel guylines on the north side pulled out of the end wraps. That's one helluva strain!! Here's a dropbox link with more of the carnage. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dd7u5ys1xw9syfh/AABThw5P0RUQNJak-FAbHDLPa?dl=0 |
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About 10 years or so ago a friend had a COMMERCIAL Tower i.e roughly a 20 foot 4 leg base 120' tall, that due to wind and ice went BOOM! It was part of a series of commercial and ham towers on a mountain top at about 10,000 ft ! It did have one ham repeater on it but mostly it was cellphone and microwave links for TV and law enforcement/commercial radio. Only "good" thing about it was it fell in the ONLY direction it could have fallen and NOT take out any of the other towers in the "group". Still was a massive mess not only with some critical infrastructure going off the air but cell system and TV as well! Plus all the BS with the insurance, having to get portable systems on the mountain to replace what went down but replacing everything that was destroyed to begin with! Took almost a year to get most of the permanent systems back up!
Best of luck to your friend! As you can tell been there and done that, no interest in doing it again!!!!! Sarge |
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Winters are not kind to towers here. https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/282113/Tower-photo-179458.png |
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Is that "up north" in AZ? My little group have removed several towers down here in "the valley" that look almost new despite them being 50 years old. Quoted:
Quoted:
Winters are not kind to towers here. https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/282113/Tower-photo-179458.png |