> I observed that I'd counted 138 antennas on top, when I
> was last there. That's without porcupines. They were
> un-moved.
>
> My assumption would be that the porcupines pre-date the
> knowledge that they do no good.
The fact government or private installations buy things and
install them doesn't mean they work as claimed. Governments
are also slow to learn anything.
A con artist from Florida selling sliced-up scrap PC boards
in epoxy sold hundreds of "solid state automatic tuners" to
the government. These things were just wire wound resistors
and a powdered iron core wound with a winding that
essentially did nothing and some scrap components in epoxy.
Now this is a first hand fact, not a rumor.....
I took a call from a US Government agency that was using
those devices and couldn't get them "repaired". They also
had a power failure with them at high power they wanted
corrected. When I told the head government tech what the
auto tuners really were and suggested I could put some large
non-inductive resistors in a housing for him, he said the
automatic tuners that had "no moving parts" and "ran off RF
power only" worked and that's what they wanted for
replacements, not a resistor. He hung up and went off to
search for the matching system of his dreams, not interested
in a $150 replacement because it wasn't a "tuner".
A local drag strip did the something similar. Someone duped
them into buying all these little static dissipaters because
they always took hits on light poles that ruined the
electronics at the track, and after they installed the
dissipaters they still took hits. Nothing noticeable changed
until he common grounded the conductors entering the
building where they watched the track (the tower) and
grounded at each score board. After grounding to common
grounds and grounding cable shields before connecting to
scoreboards the problem went way down.
One thing I noticed in Florida has been that the amount of
lightning mitigation devices is or was growing. At first
some of the places I saw had only porcupines. Now they
actually have additional tall supports with umbrellas on
top. Next I expect to see fake golfers on top of poles with
clubs raised.
Bottom line is I'm sure most people selling and buying these
things don't know as much about lightning and electricity as
the average person populating this reflector. They are
desperate buyers ready to buy or try anything, and like any
human don't like to be told they made a bad choice and don't
like to throw away anything they bought and we paid for.
73 Tom
_______________________________________________
See: http://www.mscomputer.com for "Self Supporting Towers", "Wireless Weather
Stations", and lot's more. Call Toll Free, 1-800-333-9041 with any questions
and ask for Sherman, W2FLA.
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