On 1/15/01 4:43 PM, rmoodyg@juno.com at rmoodyg@juno.com wrote:
>Seems to me that the gist of all this is that those of us who live in
>Florida or
>on the Gulf coast can't have an antenna larger than a rubber duckie on
>top
>of any reasonably tall tower.
It has to be a really STOUT tall tower to support more than a rubber
duckie. Some towers wouldn't even support themselves at 110 mph.
> I see all these ads for towers with X
>number
>of square feet of antenna at 50 mph! What a joke.
Absolutely. There's no where in the country that isn't at least 70 mph.
50 mph capacities are meaningless. The reason these companies don't
publish 70 mph figures is their antenna capacities would be
embarrassingly small.
So, instead, hams are encouraged to massively overload their towers.
> My unguyed, house
>bracketed, 40 foot Rohn 25 has been up for the last 20+ years. I don't
>have a permit, (A bad idea, I agree) and it's made it through Andrew and
>a couple of lesser hurricanes.
So, when the tower DOES fail, even though you've been lucky for 20 years,
and does damage, are you SURE your insurance company will pay to fix
everything?
>When I looked at the Rohn catalogue when I
>bought the tower, I realized that getting it approved would be
>impossible, so
>I didn't try. What's a feller to do?? I sympathize with anyone trying
>to put up
>any kind of stick here or wherever the county wind figure is 110 or
>higher.
I sympathize, too. But you can do things. You can properly engineer your
tower. You can put up a shorter tower than you thought. You can put up a
much more robust tower than you thought.
That's the one thing I realised after reading TowerTalk a couple of
years. If you want to put a tower up right, it's going to cost you, but
you'll end up with something that won't keep you awake on stormy nights.
Bill Coleman, AA4LR, PP-ASEL Mail: aa4lr@arrl.net
Quote: "Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!"
-- Wilbur Wright, 1901
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