The Fascinating Anatomy of Radio Towers

today I'm talking about Towers they are kind of one of the biggest things that you notice about a radio station they're very tall they are very prominent on the landscape and you can see them for miles and miles away but the tower is either just a structure or it's the antenna itself it kind of depends with an FM station it's the structure with an AM station it's the tower itself so the anatomy of a tower you have the tower itself the structure the Steel part that goes up into the air that's the obvious part there are different styles there are different ways that you can construct it and there are actual companies out there that build towers so that's not something that you will ever probably ever have to deal with and maybe one of these days I can actually interview a tower company that would be kind of cool but let's continue talking about the tower you also have different parts like I had mentioned earlier there are guidelines and the guidelines are there to hold the tower in place now the tower itself is basically a stick standing straight up into the air and that stick when it feels any type of wind or any type of Earth movement or whatever or even just the structure itself warming and cooling or loading up with or any of that needs to be supported so there you have guidelines and these guidelines will come off at certain points of the structure to hold it in place to keep that Tower from twisting or from bending or from collapsing it has happened a guideline fails and Tower goes down never never a good thing but the guidelines are there to support it to basically hold that Tower in place and it provides uh stress not stress is not the right word but tension to hold that that stick in the air at the right angle that it needs to be which is straight up and down and to keep it from moving granted there's going to be some movement just because nothing's perfect but this these guidelines keep it from moving and these guidelines come down to uh guideline bases and these things go down into the ground for a good amount of distance because there's a lot of of of stress that happens when a tower is loaded with ice or when a tower is uh hit by wind not sure if you can hear it but that noise is the wind passing through the towers the tower are singing so you want to make sure that those guidelines don't come out of the ground I was at a station in Bakersfield where we had guidelines that were in very soft dirt and I think they buried them pretty well the best they could but you could start to see behind the guy anchor that's the bottom part of the guy lines the anchor started to pull and you can see the little bit of a crater that was being formed again it happens so you need to have a company come out and reberry those and ren strengthen them and even tension those guidelines every so often because the steel will start to stretch it'll sag and it won't hold the tower in the right position there's a bunch of birds on the tower and on the guy wires and they're making all kinds of noise the second most obvious thing about a radio station Tower is the tower markings whether it be paint whether it be lights those are the two main ways of marking a tower the tower that's behind me has lights on fulltime Tower marking is regulated by the FAA now the FAA doesn't want Pilots running into obstacles and obstructions and a 800 900,000 ft Tower is definitely an obstruction the FAA regulates Tower marking lights paint and that is all set forth in the FAA advisory circular ac70 slant 74 60-1 Lima it talks about Tower Light Tower paint and what towers need to be painted and lighted and it talks about different other types of structures too water towers water tanks large buildings that are near airport s there are all different types of obstructions that need to be marked and this circular talks about which ones need to be marked and how they need to be marked so let's talk about Tower painting real quick the iconic red and white paint that you'll see on on a structure it's required by the FAA and the FCC technically now there are ways that you can go about doing it the tower behind me is not painted they can use lights daytime lights instead of painting and these are white strobes that that happen we'll talk about lights here in a minute but the the paint is there so Pilots don't fly into Towers it makes them very obvious and stand out from the background from the landscape so it's that Aviation orange and it's a white and they're alternating bands and it's the each band is about 17th of the tower structure there have been some incidents where aircraft have struck Towers uh the one that I heard about relatively recently was in Los Angeles back in gosh 2004 I believe it was uh KFI in Los Angeles actually La marada is near the Fullerton Airport and it was unfortunate it was Sunday morning and this aircraft hit a tower and the pilot and the passenger were killed but it also caused the Old Tower that was there their 800t a tower to collapse on itself and it pretty much just came straight down now the new tower now that tower that Old Tower was painted it was lit at night it was marked on the on the charts the aeronautical charts charts so it is known it and it predates the airport that was built so it's been known but accidents do happen so we want to reduce the amount of accidents and that's why we have to paint and light the towers you're probably familiar with the red lights that you see on the towers like the ones over my shoulder here well those are part of the required Tower markings that the FAA has as you need to have if you have a tower these lights are there for Pilots to see the towers at night so like medical helicopters police helicopters or even just flights that happen at night you want to know and you want to see where the towers are so there's a couple of systems at work and uh you generally have your Aviation red obstruction lights and these are your typical red lights that you see like these over here over my shoulder that you have the steady burning ones and you have the flashing ones that happen at the top of the tower these have typically been incandescent lights for majority of the history of tower lighting and now with LED technology it's become a lot cheaper to operate these lights you also have medium intensity obstruction lights and uh these are going to flash during the daytime and then kind of get dimmer for the night time automatically and then you also have your high-intensity white obstruction lights and these are the ones you definitely can see during the daytime they are bright white flashings those are the ones you've seen earlier in this video on that Tower and as they also turn their intensity down so that way you don't Blind Pilots or people who live in areas nearby and it's all based on what was specified when the tower was built and then again then again there's oddballs uh there's some historic towers that have something very very different for Tower lighting now that I'm inside where it's a little bit warmer let's talk about maintaining your tower lights uh monitoring your tower lights uh tower climbers Tower safety things like that so monitoring your tower lights there are systems that do this there are systems that monitor the amount of current that is being used by the lights when they turn on and when those lights turn on it pulls a certain amount of current and when the lights turn off it stops pulling that current so it can monitor how fast the lights are blinking it can monitor how long the lights are blinking and there's a lot of alarming that you can can do with it and to know how your lighting system is working that's with your standard typical Aviation red obstruction lights which are your you know your red ones and really if those are the incandescent ones once you start getting into the world of LED lights then it's a little bit different because the power draw is a lot less and so it's harder to monitor for these older systems if your lights are on and if they're working properly there are newer systems that will monitor those and they have different ways of doing it but you need to have some method of monitoring your tower lights cuz you need to know when those lights go off and the fact that they do turn on the FCC does require that you monitor your tower lights at least once and every 24 hours whether that be visually or by equipment by remote control equipment so having a remote control is very nice I can tie right into your remote control system and automatically log it every day and notify you if it doesn't turn on or if they turn off or if there's any type of failure if your lights do turn off or they don't turn on when they're supposed to then you need to call the faa's notice to Airman line and it's a phone number that you call and you basic basically get a notice to Airman or notm issued and a notm is basically a notification to Pilots that tells them hey the tower the lights the obstruction lights on this obstruction are off whether it be a tower whether it be a water tank whether it be a building or whatever they are expecting lights to be on and this notice basically tells them hey the lights are not working so it's important you call them up you give give them your name who you are your antenna site registration and ASR number that's there's a unique one for every Tower obstruction they will give you a notm number you write that down you get their initials and they will basically say thanks have a good day it's good for 15 days if for some reason you need to go beyond 15 days you need to call them back and say hey I need to extend it my equipment is still not working and they'll say no problem it's extended if you get it resolved you need to call them back and let them know hey this has been resolved and you can cancel that notm now I did have a time when I did make a call and I didn't know that it a expires and B that you need to uh cancel it I got a phone call from the FCC saying hey you have this notm open still uh is this still going and I didn't realize that I needed to cancel it so I said oh yes my bad I did not cancel it I did not know and they're like no problem give them a call and cancel it so that was a pretty no Bigg e there fortunately but I'm letting you know you need to cancel it when you get it fixed having that as part of your record as part of your station log just make make a notation of it what the notem number is your the initials of the person who took the call and why they were off let's touch on safety for just a moment now if you are not sure if it's an AM or an FM antenna don't touch it in fact you should not even be past the fences where the signs the warning signs are if you don't know what you're doing if you don't know the difference between an AM and FM Tower you should not be behind that fence period now in am Tower we'll have the the stick the antenna sitting on on top of a ceramic cylinder kind of like this except it's usually darker brown but anyways it's the antenna is sitting on top of just that that ceramic cylinder now that ceramic cylinder is actually an insulator and that insulates the antenna from ground because the tower is the antenna the currents are going to be insanely dangerous you do not want to be touching that Tower because then you become the p path to ground you will get electrocuted and that will be a very bad day for you so don't do that if you need to touch the tower for whatever reason make sure the transmitter is off make sure you safety the transmitter whether that be opening the circuit breaker or otherwise disabling any way for a remote control someone at the studio to turn on the transmitter or anybody else working at the site to turn on the transmitter you don't want that thing being turned on while you're out there working at the tower second thing is when you're working on the tower not only is it a good transmitting antenna it's also a very good receiving antenna Now by that I mean it will receive other stations that are nearby and maybe not so nearby and you'll still get all those electrical currents and when you touch that Tower you're going to get zaed electrocuted you might it might even be fatal it really depends but there's ways to make sure a tower is safe you can get standard Automotive jumper cables and connect one side to the tower to bare metal on the Tower and the other side to ground but not like the ground ground but uh there's usually a couple of little balls that are sitting next to each other near the base of the Tower and these balls are there for lightning protection they're basically a a spark gap usually there's there's bare metal on those so you can clamp to one clamp to the other but that's your good point for grounding your antenna always ground your antenna when you work on it it's very important for an AM station um if you're an FM station the tower is probably sitting on metal or concrete base and you know it's safe to touch for for the most part now I probably shouldn't have to say this but I will under no circumstances is there any reason for you to climb the tower period end of story full stop do not do it you are not a tower climber there is nothing that is important enough for you to risk your life to climb a tower there is nothing important enough being off the air doesn't matter don't do it it is not worth your life uh too many times have people climbed Towers thinking they know what they do I'm I can hang on pretty good and they fall and even a fall from 10 15 ft can be fatal imagine falling from higher than that there are sensitive things on the tower that you could step on grab break squish that you would basically be doing damage and you you wouldn't even realize it so again don't climb the tower there is no reason for you to climb any Towers call a tower company I've got three here that I've worked with that I've have great respect for comp plus Beckman Tower and Vic soberg those three I have worked with all three of them and I have been very happy with what the service that they have provided so don't don't climb the tower leave it to the professionals they have the training they have the equipment and they have the experience and they have the insurance so don't climb the towers okay I'm getting off my my PSA soap box here on being safe thank you for watching today I appreciate you being here if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up otherwise um well if you're not subscribed subscribe uh leave a comment or question down below I try to answer those as best I can can and until next time stay safe stay healthy and keep [Music] learning

Channel: The Broadcast Engineer

Views: 84,073

Keywords: radio, engineer, radio engineering, broadcast, broadcast engineering, engineering, mountain, off road, towers, am towers, fm towers, towers collapse news, radio towers, anatomy of towers, tower structure, fm station, am station, tower company, tower support, tower construction, tower collapse, tower markings, tower painting, tower lights

Id: G38SiJbGgsk

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2024