@@Bward216 only once I promise.. it sucks climbing up and down just cause YOU forgot YOUR tools.. really we only carry like 2 maybe 3 tools most the time.. but climbing up 1200 feet you wouldnt go down to get something unless u absolutely had to that's a long climb
Shorted stubs don't really provide much protection against lightning, but are useful in filtering and impedance matching. The theory assumes that lightning is DC voltage, but it's not exactly. Lightning is a fast risetime pulse with most energy below 10 MHz, but some components up to 1 GHz. The stub causes a standing wave which focuses the high voltage at a resonant wavelength along the line. It is common to see pinholes at regular intervals along the transmission line after a lightning strike.
I'm glad there are good guys to repair antennas & towers. I couldn't climb that tower if a million dollars was waiting for me! Looking forward to your next video.
I did Derrick weld inspections free climbing with pelican hooks and man did it feel good to step on solid ground the body positioning is murder cand imagine another 900 ft lol much respect sir
When you like your work and you're on vacation every day. Just be safe, work slowly and deliberately and don't let anyone, I repeat, anyone, tell you to hurry up when you're on a tower. John
Good video. These videos motivated me to get into (something besides) this work. Have any crawl space openings? You're doing real men's work here and I'm sure for 1 million a year. Where's the parachute?
I'm sure you know this. Take mustard packets with you. When you start to cramp squirt one or two in your mouth. The vinegar, salt and turmeric helps to eliminate or reduce cramping.
I've worked on steel smokestacks about a third as high as you work putting air quality sensors in place and had a ladder welded in place to climb but getting up that structure like you do would wear me out!
This is probably a stupid question but why not put an elevator that runs the entire height of the pole. Just figured it migjt be safer but either way my hats off too ya cause I have a mild fear of heights and this had me like oh shit.
Great Channel, I love watching your videos. I pass this tower and its brother every time i go to/through Nashville. Out of curiosity, I think its next to this one, what is the story with the decommissioned tower next to it?
@@vtwinbuilder3129 They used the same towers in my area when changing to digital. What's the sense in buying new property, building a new tower and transmitter building, etc to change to digital when you can just swap out the analog transmitter for a digital one? The antennas are the same regardless.
Biggest question how's the rescue plan if something goes terribly wrong you only have a little bit before you can die. Don't have a controlled decent device?
The stub at the top of the FM antenna is not to be a lighting arrest or as the video detailed. It is to provide the correct impedance to the last splitter that feeds the top bay.
Been doing this for 6 years but on the wireless side. I read a comment about you guys making 2 to 300k a year? I get lucky to push 100k. You broadcast guys get hazard pay I’m guessing? Idk but I’ll drop the wireless side and hop on that wagon you guys are pullin making that kinda bread. Stay warm and stay 100.
You have to REALLY trust your harness gear in order to be able to do this work. I done industrial work at much lower heights (100' and less) and I never really felt that I trusted my hooks, harness and lanyard. I would have trouble functioning at altitudes that these guys work at.
I'd be slow and deliberate all right. Crawling away just as deliberately as I could get. Calf cramps were bad enough. I could bounce them out like a ballet toe dancer but when a THIGH cramp hjit, it's it just howl and wait. My Sweetie came in and watched for about 20 seconds, wheezed 2ice and hit the door. I've watched a BUNCH of your videos and it still gets to me. GOOD WORK ALL YALL! Thanks, John!
Thanks Lewie. Friday I was working only fifty or sixty feet above the ground using my customer for ground support. We get far enough behind that I have to do that sort of thing every so often. The tower was built in 1951 or 53 and is a bit awkward to work on. I found myself doing all sorts of gymnastics mounting a side arm that weighed about 40 pounds and a 30 pound antenna. I'm hoping the camera shows some of the effort. If it does I'll probably publish it before too long. It is good though to be in great shape at 73. John
Flying an airplane doesn't bother me until I get over a tower and look down. For some reason that connection, like looking over a cliff and with how high you are always spooks me.
The thing on the elbow is in fact a 50 ohm load. I had Garrett place it on the adapter so that I could check the health of the feed line. I swept the line wiht my Anritsu 365E. Most arrays in broadcasting, if not all, are for AM stations. This antenna is for an FM station and while it's directional it is a stand-alone antenna and not a member of an array. John
Cramps are common. Haha. Yea my butt muscle is cramped up from being scared as hell looking down. You sir if i ever see you beer is on me. In sure OSHA will be coming up to do inspection with you guys. Haha
Be careful in the Kitchen. There are a lot of dangerous appliances in there and kitchen chairs are always unreliable. :-) Once used to tower work it isn't that bad. John
Oh My God! That tower is ridiculously high; surely it has to be hard to breath all the way up there. I have worked out however what that clanging noise is, it's Garrett's balls of steel hitting the pole! Go Garrett.......I will never see the world from the same places you do, I can't believe you can climb that bloody high and not shit yourself.
Great video as always guys. Was the burnout caused by lightning? And was there other damage to the antenna? Just wondering why it had to come down and be rebuilt. Thanks again for another thrill packed episode in “The amazing adventures of Towerman”
Coming to the ground to be rebuilt was a manufacturer's suggestion. Personally I would have taken it down to the closest arbor (the three support arms) and worked on it right there. Of course I specialize in RF devices something that's kind of rare in the tower business. I just happen to climb also. The arbors are about six feet wide and forty feet long and given decent weather a good place to lay things out. I'm guessing that the reason the factory crew took about seven days was due to the necessity to take the old antenna all the way to the ground and probably bad weather. The weather has been quite difficult here until this week. I hope the worse is behind us. We are way behind. John
The antenna had been damaged for more than a year. I believe it had been damaged by lightning but a sweep indicated an excellent standing wave ratio. The engineer didn't call us back to inspect the antenna until further problems occurred a year later. It was probably hit by lighting in February 2017 but there may have been some other cause. I estimate the antenna to be about 30 years old but that may not be accurate. It may be as young as 15 years. The station has changed hands several times so there's no easily found record. John
Due to the location of the fault, I doubt it was lighting. The bullet tube construction of the line has a failure mode where if a little tarnish builds on the metal interface it gains resistance and heats. Heat increases the rate of oxidization of the joint. When a system is pressurized with nitrogen, the end often traps air which has the oxygen that starts the process especially if there is some moisture. Higher power installs involve pulling a vacuum to evaporate and remove moisture and purging with nitrogen several times to make the joints last longer. Once a joint has enough resistance, the overheating becomes severe and the connection melts and the resulting gap strikes an arc which then burns back the center and then arcs to the outer tube burning the hole seen from the outside. At this point the transmitter is starting to see high reflected power. The initial arc on the burning center conductor produces very little reflected power. When it arcs to the shell the reflected power increases and transmitted power drops off rapidly. I didn't do this more than a couple of years and had only one burnout on a FM broadcast station.
We have too many tools to tether them all. It's been quite some time since I dropped a tool from a tower at any height. I haven't asked and probably should if my guys have dropped any also. I'm guessing they haven't. We have a big incentive to not drop our tools. We need them. If your like me you probably have a drawer somewhere where you throw computer or audio cables that are not needed. Usually when I finally need a special cable I'll open the drawer and find that the cable I need is tangled with all the other cables. When multiple tools are tethered and put back into what we call "nose bags" (Canvas bags) the tools and separate tethers seem to mate like a pit of snakes creating one big mess. It's best just to be incredible focused on the work at hand and the tools needed. John
I've used Motorola in the past. We were one of the first Motorola Dealers in Middle Tennessee. Now, everyone knows that Motorola had been selling two-way radios for years prior to 1988 but they had no dealers, just factory paid salesmen. When Asian and cheap American products started to show up Motorola kept selling with the high paid salesmen but as things got a little tougher they started creating (non-Motorola owned) dealers. That's when we became one of the first in Middle Tennessee. Years go by, we could not sustain our company by selling Motorola exclusively so we added other product lines. Then one day, out of the blue, a Motorola sales person shows up in our Murfreesboro shop and announces that Motorola was pulling our dealership. The excuse given was Motorola was looking to create large dealers and get rid of the small dealers. Actually they had been playing their normal games and had made another shop a dealer probably due to local government pressure. Prior to this, if we had gone exclusively Motorola we could never have kept our sales up but until the announcement we had been selling that brand pretty well. Our other brands were Kenwood, Harris and Hytera (among others) were quite popular and sold very well. So, the basic answer to your question is that we're using Kenwood TK-3160 (UHF) and on towers with TV transmitters we use Kenwood TK-D240V (VHF) portables capable of doing both digital and analog. We are licensed for the UHF channels and use the three VHF channels not requiring licenses when using VHF radios. Why UHF or VHF. UHF TV transmitters cause the portable UHF radio receiver to become desensitized due to the closeness of the frequencies. VHF portables operate on frequencies much lower than the TV channels and are immune to desensitization. Desensitization means the receivers lose sensitivity and thus receive range. Don't we turn off all the transmitters before climbing towers? The only time TV broadcasters turn their transmitters off is after midnight and that's usually when we're working on their antennas specifically. During normal daytime tower work it's easy to stay out of the TV antenna's potentially (but not likely) damaging field while we work on other things. If you're not near the antenna, within reason, it won't hurt you. Often we're more than 200 feet away from a transmitting antenna when climbing. That's a lot and I hope you read all of it. John
@@jhettish I appreciate your reply and yes I read all of it! Sounds like Motorola is a bit of a bully about getting their way, never knew about that. I was wondering about being close to high power antennas. Some of those radio towers are pumping 50,000 to 100,000watts of RF radiation. I hope there isn't any long-term effects of being close to that kind of power output!
@@xxch4osxx Hello again. When TV or FM stations talk about or advertise 50,000 or 100,000 watts they're talking about Effective Radiated Power (ERP). There are two forms of ERP but I'll leave that alone for now. ERP takes several things into account but mainly it describes the distance the signal can travel with significant strength. The way it's calculated the idea takes into account transmitter actual power, the percentage of loss of that power in the feed line (Coax) connecting the transmitter to the antenna and the "gain" of the antenna. Antenna gain has nothing to do with amplification. It's all about focusing energy in order to cancel useless radiation and adding it to the useful radiation. That way an antenna theoretically (and in reality) can cover an area as though the full 50K or 100K were actually being directly connected to an antenna that had no gain. It's all about saving electricity (in a sense) but getting the most bang for the buck. Here's a simple example. If I have a transmitter capable of putting out 300 watts on a given frequency and I use coaxial cable with 1db of loss every 100 feet and it takes 300 feet of coax to reach the antenna the resultant actual electrical power reaching the antenna would be reduced by half. In other words the power reaching the antenna would be 150 watts if measured by a watt meter. If that antenna has what is known as "unity gain" then the ERP would be 150 watts. However if the antenna has a gain of 3db the ERP would be roughly 300 watts once again. Mathematically it's not exactly correct but let's consider the idea that the antenna was designed to focus the energy and is advertised as a 6db gain antenna the ERP would be 600 watts. We have 1/2 power loss in the coax but then the overall gain after the 3db loss of the (very bad) coax causes 1/2 actual electrical power, 300 watts, to become 150 watts. However the 6db gain design of the antenna brings the increases the effective (theoretical) power to rise all the way to 600 watts. As for the Electro-Magnetic Exposure (EME) danger to workers, EME is considered non-ionizing radiation, meaning basically that whatever enters a person's body does not stay there. Ionizing radiation, that that being radiated by radioactive material like Plutonium or even uranium enters the body if sufficiently powerful, and stay there for various periods of time.
I could have added an analogy. If you have a short sleeve shirt on and stand about 6 inches away from an incandescent light bulb your arm will get hot. However when you move about three feet or even less from that lamp your arm will cool down. If what the lamp put out was radio active and not non-ionizing radiation you would probably not feel anything but your exposure to the radioactive material would be absorbed and would stay in the body potentially causing all sorts of problems. I don't think EME (non-ionizing) has yet to be a proven health risk with the exception being direct bodily contact to the radiator of Electro-Mechanical Energy, like the light bulb, a camp fire or the sun.
Those poles are either mounts or part of the other antennas mounted there, and unfortunately when you go to mount usually the company that hires you tells you the area and which way it needs to face so you stab it where they want it and try to make it as easy as possible to get around for the next guy but sometimes it's not possible
Does anyone know the "official" title of this job? Im 15 and I'd love to have a job like this someday since I love radio but Im not smart enough to be an RF engineer 😂 I just cant figure out what this job would be called besides "tower climber"
Even knowing you are fully secured, my stomach drops when you switch hands and move your head... You guys are nuts ... Not gonna state what I am thinking all through this vid... Don't want to jinx anything, but let's just say I am glad my ass sits on a chair all day 😂🤣
Welds don’t just get weak with time. A weld is either weak from the start or strong permanently. A proper weld fuses the two metals together completely turning them to one.
CatsMeowPaw thus pole is made to higher standards than anything welded on the frame of your vehicle. Do you ever worry about traveling down the freeway at eighty miles per hour?
I believe that is I-24 below. I used to travel that highway a good bit. Coming back on I-24 I knew once I saw these towers in the distance I knew I was almost in Nashville.
Obviously it depends but this one would take around 50 to 60 minutes. It's not a bad tower to climb. There are towers I've climbed that were difficult to say the least. This one is well maintained and no one has tried to secure cable to the climbing ladder. John
I personally haven't seen a tower with a elevator I would imagine that to be a stupid tall tower, I've climbed 1000ft plus a few times, double clipping the whole way and on a guided tower it tends to move/ dance when the wind blows.. but for towers that have no ladder at the bottom we usually have one on the truck or if possible 9out of 10 times we just climb whatevers around to get to it
they'll find it cool that these guys are climbing this particular Tower I've always been amazed how tall they are cuz I would pass them as a kid when we would go south on 75 to vacation in Florida
This video was from April 2018. In June 2018 I took a fall from a tree while trying to rescue a kitten that didn't want to be rescued. For that I had my pelvis repaired and spent 67 days in two different hospitals. Prior to this I had only spent one night in a hospital and that was a sleep study I never should have taken. Today is December 17, 2021 and I'm about 96.256 as well as I was prior to the tree fall. Trees are dangerous. I've been SCUBA diving since I was 18 and as an instructor I used to take students to Panama City Beach for the open water part of certification. I'm also certified for Cave Diving. Last time I did any diving at all was in 2013 in the Keys. In 2013 I was 68 years old. Today I'm very close to 77 years of age and still capable of diving, climbing, flying an airplane or running but my wife brought so many kittens home there's no way we can get away due to the animal population. The kittens have somehow become Cats. My animals give me a lot of pleasure and they trust me. I'm not going to kill them because they've become inconvenient. With more than a couple of animals and no relatives it's almost impossible to get someone to feed them while I'm in vaction. So, I keep working and stay at home or at work. I do enjoy my work.
Thanks for the comment and you might guess that I've heard the tethering idea over and over again. Believe me that in 48 years I've tried just about every idea to control tools but have never had good luck with anything other than situational awareness. We use a large variety of tools often and when pulling one out of the nose bag others get tangled and try to come out in an unrully group and we end up with a mess. I put great emphasis on controling the tools when working at height and we're very alert on the ground also. If you've ever carefully coiled up audio or video cables and put them in a box for storage you may have noticed that the cable tend to socialize with one another and have become a mass of confusion when you try to retrieve one of the cables. Multiple tools all tethered with separate lines seem to do the same thing. When I'm asked what's the scariest thing in tower work I answer that it's dropping something I need. That scares me the most. If the item is critical and I'm at 1000 feet above ground I might have to climb to the bottom, find what I lost or get another and then .................climb back to the work site and finish the job. There are few things to be avoided than climbing 1000 feet plus a second time in the same day. Been there, hated that but did that anyway. I don't know about others in this business but I weigh 26 pounds more, mostly safety gear, when I climb. Bringing spare tools would increase the weight even more. John
That top mast looks a real pig to climb theres no hand holds or points to stand COMFORTABLY whilst carrying out repairs. Antenna designers need to THINK OF THE AERIAL TEAMS! 😡 hows about putting the odd RING PLATFORM around those uprights?
Hope you are well.. been a while since I heard anything out of you.. just had a birthday turned 59 .. thinking about a career change .. light bulb changer.. bright idea .. but someones got to do it😏😁👍
Actually I'm doing well. I've not succumed to Covid 19 yet and hope to bypass it completely. I haven't climbed any higher than 950 feet since September 23, 2019. I was much younger then, only 74. I've been doing a lot of antenna sweeping and work with every job being the burnout from hell. I'll give you a call soon. John (the other John)
@@jhettish glad to hear.. I have been essential.. so I’ve been fortunate to have been able to work the whole time.. I am really looking into climbing aspect .. the training and getting certified even if I don’t get climb a tower with the younger tower dogs🤣🤣🤣
