N0AX said:
>There are plenty of places to live in the area where you can put up a
>skyhook...check out the older subs, unincorporated King County, and,
>surprisingly, the city of Seattle. My suggestion is to drive around until
>you see a tower and ask your agent to shop in those locales.
>
>73 and Good Hunting!
>
>Ward N0AX
It is STILL VERY IMPORTANT to check the regulations. Any ham tower you see
could have been installled before the strict regulations went into effect.
(My case, exactly.) Or, it could simply be an illegal tower that has
escaped execution so far . . .
I found out when I lived in LA in the early '60s that there were legal and
illegal antenna supports. I was on a 63 foot wide lot and wanted to go 90
feet or so. Not possible with a conventional guyed tower so I chose to use
a very tall wooden pole (110 feet) without guys. I tried like crazy to get
a permit to put it up to no avail. The City told me they NEVER issued
permits for wooden poles. However, I noticed thousands of telephone and
power poles and pointed that out. They said because they were public
utilities, they were exempt from the permit process. Frustrated, I put the
pole up anyway since I knew of several other installations in the city that
were not public utilities that had poles. Surprise! Surprise! My pole was
condemned and I was ordered to remove it within a week.
At this point I got serious about this whole thing and approached each pole
owner I was aware of (Henry Radio, W6RW, and a couple of other hams who's
calls I can't remember). I asked them about the process they went through
to get their permits and nobody but Henery Radio would discuss it at all
which suggested to me they did not have permits. I found out that Henry's
pole was a super expensive installation with the pole mounted in a concrete
"well casing" with the pole suspended in air and not touching concrete,
earth, or water. Such an installation would have been WAY beyond my budget,
besides my pole was ALREADY installed in the dirt like utility poles.
So, I went back to each pole owner and said that even if their poles did not
have a permit, I could still use them as a precedent for my installation
because the fact that the city did not require them to take theirs down
constituted permitting them to leave them up and the City would have to
treat me the same way. I also suggested that the result COULD be that we
would ALL have to take our poles down. Mild panic ensued and each of the
ham pole owners joined my efforts to locate a legitimate ham-owned permitted
pole in LA which was set in the dirt that I could use as a precident. We
actually FOUND one (I would NEVER have found it alone)! Rather than blow
the whistle on the other guys with poles, I used only the permitted pole as
a precident by getting copies of all the paperwork from the City records
(without letting on to the Building Department what I was up to since I did
not want to take a chance that the records would suddenly "disappear") and
waving them in front of the building permit people. I got my permit and
used that pole in Canoga Park from about 1964 until about 1969. My call was
WB6ENX at the time.
I think this is what "contesting" is all about . . .
Stan W7NI@teleport.com
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