Up on the internet tower today......

Put this tower up about 10 years ago, had wireless internet from a local provider. Local provider went downhill to the point it was useless, and I had to switch over to much crappier DSL thru the phone company....like 500k tops.

But recently, a neighbor of mine needed high speed to work at home, so we got a cable connection on the other side of the mountain on a buddy of mine's place, ran it thru a wireless link from the cable router to a transceiver on the tower ( put up today ), and down to the valley on our side of the mountain.....YEAH !.....15 meg connection when the cable company finishes their install at my buddy's. Coming soon to my house, 21st Century internet !

Tower (pic from years ago)



Looking out from top of the tower toward the foothills leading up to the mountains.



100' up, looking down to the base.




Looking east into North Carolina.



Looking down into my valley....my place is at the base of the mountain. The tower is the upper end of my property.

 

FABULOUS pics! Wow, what a place to live! I just hope the tower, "towering" above the hills, doesn't act as a signpost to the maddening horde that folks live nearby! Always the pessimist, that's moi!

 

Completely amazing view.

 

TnAndy. Hey, you may want to put an aircraft warning light up there !

 

Looks like beautiful country, what type of trees are those in your area. I'm used to seeing evergreen (fir and conifer) trees.

 

You're probably not far from that view or one similar to it. Go to Asheville and head towards Sam's Gap on 23; bang a left at Erwin on 107, then 351, then 70 back to 23. You can get lost in those mountains for a while if you wanted to.

I used to ride my bike through there when I went to ETSU.

 

Yep.....those mountains.

 

Mostly red and chestnut oak up around the tower. Some evergreen down the mountain.

 

Not far at all. About 45 min.

 

Actually, the top of the tower is barely above tree top level, so if aircraft are that low, they have other problems.

Notice the tops of the trees on the north side.....I'm barely 15-20' above them.



From the more populated side of the county, you can't even see the tower unless you know exactly where to look.

 

Hey Bruce....I dug out some pics from the early years of construction..around 2003/04.....here's a few:


Hauling my Miller Bobcat up there to weld stuff:



From the work landing area right below the top looking up to the tower base. The tower itself sits just below the crest of the ridge. My property goes to the crest, but the way the rock worked out, that was about as close as I could get the base, and still have room to work being on my side of the ridge.



Tower base. Built a "rock box" for the base out of some big square tubing, and 4" pipe, lined the inside with chain link fence, then pile rock inside for ballast. No way to get concrete up there, so this was the solution I came up with.



Tower base closeup: The first section of the tower (50') is a surplus aviation tower that came from a local airport...real heavy duty thing, legs are 3" pipe, about 40" apart in a triangle. The base metal it sits on is a hunk of 3/4" plate, which is welded to the pipe in the back. That 4"pipe sits inside a short stub of 5" pipe so the base hinges on that collar. Then the 3/4 plate was drilled and bolted to the two 4" pipes welded to the rockbox base ( center and forward )

The heavy tower was assembled laying down the hill, the the whole thing tilted up into place using my dozer and tractor. The lightweight sections of the tower were hauled up and assembled later using a gin pole deal.



Since basically there is nothing BUT rock up there, I didn't have a way to drill out for something to hold the ground end of the guy wires, so this was the solution: Build 3 of these "mats" out of 4" pipe ( found a real deal on pipe at a scrapyard ), weld a turnbuckle to it as shown, scoop out the deepest hole I could with the dozer, slide the mat in place and cover with as much rock as possible. Seems to have worked out fine. Real "seat of the pants" engineering, huh ? A cobble's dream come true.... ahahahahaaaa

 

And TODAY, the cable guys came, and we now have 6 Meg speed.....about 10 time better than DSL ! I can actually watch a 4 minute You-tube in real time rather than waiting 20 minutes on it to trickle in.

 

When I lived in rural NW Ohio we used a company called MetaLINK that built towers in each town where DSL and Cable were unavailable, and then each subscribers home had a receiver. Wasn't quite as fast as DSL but it sure as heck was better than earthlink dial up. Downside was the 900mhz frequency they made those in town use, interference out the yang. The outlying homes were sold 2.4ghz receivers.

 

Damn I hope you were tethered when you took those pictures?

 

Maybe I have it mixed up, I've been known to be backwards on occassion

 

The Wimax 802.14 method is to use 5.8GHz interlink and 2.4GHz subscriber.
...
900MHz is gone for reliable wireless (too many electric blender remotes to deal with)...
...
Dave
Phoenix, AZ