These are the unsung Heroes of Broadcasting and ill bet they don,t get the big money the so called stars of radio and television get ,These are the real heroes .
I have nothing but 100% respect for people that perform jobs of this nature. I worked in a chemical plant and have been 200 feet on distillation columns so I have a rough idea of what they do.
I used to do this, things are alot easier doing work down from the top of the tower once there's a gin pole involved its a whole lot more work and alot more dangerous mad respect for these guys
I've got the exact pair of blue handled grips in my toolbag , but the highest they have ever been or ever likely to go is 25 feet ,,, I feel proud of myself for just watching the whole video ,,jeez these guys are really something ,,they have my full admiration,,
Mad respect, i hate to do this kind of metal&metal bolts,heavy weights works on the ground, cant imagine the patience to do it in a way like that above the clouds, no time for a coffee and very limited space to lay of your tools and confined by safetly lines etc. Stay safe and thanks for the work.
How many Russian Choristers does it take to change a light bulb? One thousand. One chorister to change the bulb and 999 choristors to sing the praises of the heroic deeds of the deceased bulb.
@@WA4RRN I had a guy about 40 years ago change the lamps on my station's 1200' tower for a few hundred $$. Back then tower guys were paid crap, no benefits, etc. Late 90's things started to improve. Later on we had 40 or so TV stations and I kept most of the business with two tower outfits. One was a super pro from Texas. The best. No shortcuts. And there were some that after they got off the tower I would never let do any work for our stations again they were risk-takers. Zero room for that. One group did a great job around 1990 changing an antenna for me. Rewarded the whole crew, their wives and kids - yeah, one guy brought his wife to jobs, and another had a little girl he had custody of and she came to the jobs, the wife of the other "home schooled" the girl on the road. Amazing guys that really are the unsung heros.
I worked in construction for many years. Whenever we saw the "Iron Workers" come onto to the site and do what they do, we were always amazed and in awe of their Fearlessness. These guys are more fearless!
You lose your depth perception at about 100ft. So it is just a bit windier higher up. I have been climbing up to 200m, and it did feel safer than some small towers with fewer security measures.
I helped erect free standing towers back in the 80's for att and we build them in sections on the ground we took 2 cranes and flip them upright then we took the crawler crane then we stacked them one on top the other highest I went was 300 and 5 feet. We had a winch truck and block and tackled the microwave dishes to the tower.
@@skipjack5964 Thanks for input. In Houston, TX many towers are located in one particular area. Many years ago a tower was being erected. A local resident happened to be filming the job. What he captured was a Horrific and Tragic accident. As 1 of the final section was being hoisted up several hundred feet up. A bracket on the cable failed. There workers on the section, sadly they did not survive. I will Always have a deep respect for Tower Workers.
For several years I worked on towers up to 304'. I'm sure climbing this antenna's height could seem scarier, but if there was a vertical velocity mishap, the results would be similar and final. Nice view from near the apex...
I knew a guy who ran an installation crew. When he was in Africa doing a job, Orangutangs would come out of the jungle to see what was going on. Eventually they climbed on the tower and hung out with the crew, just hanging by their arms, swinging and swaying at 1000 feet up. No fear. He said, "I wanted to give them wrenches and get them to work, they were naturals."
Rigging the gin pole always amazed me. Years back we'd ride the tugger basket, it was air operated, had a friction brake the tugger operator controlled so you talked real nice to him unless you had new kid in the basket you wanted to scare the piss out of.
I know that having the tools tethered would slow things down and be a pain but the possibility of one falling is certainly increased with no tether...dangerous. Gotta hand it to iron workers though, fearless!
I gotta give huge credit to these guys. I’ll fly open cockpit biplanes and things like that no problem, but this. I don’t think I could do what these guys do.
We do work on LMR sites 300 ft or less and watching these guys use a gin pole at 1000ft is wild to me... Shout out to the guy with no shirt on, no hiding from the sun at 1000ft.
These men (and women, if there are any) earn Every penny - and I hope it's a bunch. Even the hoist operator as he has to be on his toes all the time too. I sometimes get woozy looking down at my shoestrings!
My friend also told me about some instances of what happens if they accidently drop a wrence or a nut or bolt.If dropped, they yell "headache", so that noone under them looks up. He said one guy caught a 9/16 wrench across his face and it opened up real good. Another time, someone dropped a wrench, and it hit someones car parked at the bottom, and went through the engine.
When I and my crew were rigging a weather tower on Vandenberg AFB in the mid-eighties, we had a very young and green junior (his first job out of school) engineer who wouldn't climb and basically tagged along, milling about smartly down on the terra firma. It took about 20 min. to reach the top at 304'. When we got about half way up he would try to take a nap in the Dodge Prospector work vehicle. Nope, about every ten minutes he got a wake up call with a golf ball sized piece of duct seal to the roof of the vehicle. Rang like a bell and so did he. He had a good sense of humor though, so it was all in good fun. And yes it was done safely, the truck and its contents survived.
There is no way it went through the engine. Maybe through the engine bay, but it’s not going to make it through an engine. Terminal velocity is around 130 mph.
The weight of a chrome plated 9/16 open end box wrench must be around a 1/2 pound, now at 130 mph, someone would have to calculate the kinetic energy of such a wrench and then calculate the strength of a cast iron engine block, and of course the engine is only so thick in places..... just relaying what they said, I was not there.@@The_Red_Off_Road
@@joeanon5788 130 mph = 209 kph = 209.000 / 3600 = 58 m/s; the wrench weighs 0.250 kg Ekin = 1/2 * m * v^2 Ekin = 1/2 * 0,25 kg * 58^2 m/s Ekin = 420,5 Joule That's the energy of a 9mm bullet. That's enough to penetrate an aluminum engine block.
@@The_DuMont_Network Tower King II. I've personally heard Kevin Barber and his crew use these exact words on numerous occasions, including "waaaah" for stop.
I had to re-watch the start of the video because I didn't really grasp how that yellow extension was attached and raised. Now I get the idea, but there should have been more video covering how it got up there.
You'll have a climber most likely climb the entire way with a rope and at some point you split the weight like when you climb your partner lifts up the rope beneath him so you're only climbing with 100 feet worth of weight instead of 300 feet
Someone will also climb with a block, which the rope slides through. Then they'll rig cable to the rope, replace the block for the one with the cable and hoist the gin pole up, I don't know the rest as I've not worked with gin poles but getting it up there would be the same as hoisting other objects.
That lift must be strong carrying all of the weight of those guys massive balls into the sky. In all seriousness those in this profession are greatly appreciated heroes. Communications is what drives this world.
Its definitely not for everyone, that's for sure. I was a rigger for several years, and whats crazy is before that, I had an intense fear of heights. I got over it tho with some "exposure therapy", and I really enjoyed my time working in the sky. Learning how to completely trust your harness, and understanding that its going to do exactly what its supposed to do, and its not going to allow you to fall, was a big part of me being able to calmly and confidently work several hundred feet in the air.
Once you are above 20 feet it does not matter how high you go… a fall is gonna kill you. My grand father and father were both iron workers. My grandfather had incredible balance. Even a 70 he could walk a chain link fence. He worked before OSHA and all the safety regulations. It was each man for himself. There were lots of black stamps in his union book (they signified a payment into a fund to payout to a dead man’s family). They paid with their bodies… both had multiple surgeries to repair their backs and necks by the time they retired. But it was damn good paying work, especially during the depression for my grandfather.
9:12 100% safe just went out the window 🤣🤣🤣 ... There was probably a safety man with binoculars couple miles down the road having a stroke 🤣🤣🤣 ... Be safe man
I built a 1200 foot tower in Florida for branch erection it had a 360 platform All sections came from FT WORTH tower. I loved building towers in Florida. 🤠👍
Two concerns (1) still seeing lots of corrosion near and at the joint. Thought they said they were removing it? (2) Those bolts have to have a torque spec. Who is measuring it? Banging on a wrench with a hammer doesn't really torque anything.
The drone vs. Falcon races held there were really cool. Racing from the top to the ground, I think the Falcons always won those events. Goes to show you, Man will race just about anything that moves against just about anything else that moves. And place wagers on the outcome lol.
I stopped watching it for about 5 minutes and then came back, To post this message. Everybody that reads my comment should do this. If you want to know just how dangerous climbing towers really is then do this. Google these words. “ what is the percentage of death pertaining to men that climb towers for a living?” Also this. “About how many men die each year that are TOWER CLIMBERS????”
I did this for 13 years and even though I miss the work life I don't miss the partying life that came with it 😔😔😔... Is that Barry Oliver aka " Uncle Barry " at 7:12 ???
I had a tower company come to my house to repair my ham radio antenna that a hurricane twisted. They were only up about 60'. I ask if they had been on any tall towers lately. They said they just came from a 2,000' tower South of Houston.
@@EricCampbellUAV My tower is about 60' but the tower company works on commercial towers that are up to 2,000'. We have those tall towers South of Houston called the Senior Road Tower sites. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Road_Tower They did me a favor when they came out and readjusted my tower after a hurricane. The company is called OTS Quality Tower Services here in I believe Rosenburg, Texas just South West of Houston.
The direction of the antenna is rotated, this is a mistake at the beginning of the first installation or something else. It would be strange if there was an error in the direction of the antenna and it was corrected later
I just hope it worked out for the station and put some better OTA signal over the areas where people live and not so much over the Everglades Aligators don't buy much from local advertizers.
I have crazy respect for these guys, they are THE Few. Everytime I drive to work, I drive past 3 of these monsters and I often look at the top and think, someone's climbed up there. Insane to me, but to those guys and girls, it's just another day at work. Sidenote: 15:48 you can just see the curvature of the Earth! Amazing. I always hope to see someone working up there when I drive by. How often do crews go up on antennas?
I met up with two crews doing work to the transmitter tower here in U.K. at Croydon - not so famous as the one a few miles away at Crystal Palace, London but probably serves more people through the many signals sent out. Despite being sited on hills, both of these installations are babies compared with this one! Great work between all the guys - I was wondering how much load that derrick rig would take especially has its head block would never reach directly over the antenna - some deft chain block pulling going on. That mounting plate is some piece of kit compared with the tower sections eh?
is this yellow structure that lifts the men up there permanent? Or was it fixed to the antenna for the ourpose of this job and will later be removed? At 8:25 I can see the beginning of this structure, but I still can`t figure out wether this is a permanent part of the antenna (for maintenence) or not.
The yellow structure is a gin pole. They are temporary and consist of one or more sections. In this instance, the gin pole is used to secure the antenna in place. General information at wirelessestimator.com/content/industryinfo/317
Have any of your viewers heard of a U.K steeplejack called Fred Dibnah who used to demolish chimneys by setting them on fire. Ha passed away in 2002, videos are on CZcams well worth watching.
While the guys in this video certainly aren't afraid of heights, I'm afraid they'll never quite compare to the absolute legend of a man that was the late great Fred Dibnah. They don't make men like Fred Dibnah anymore. And perhaps that is for the best. I'm afraid men like Fred, and other larger than life characters of legend, would not fare well living under the constraints of today's uptight, safety first, politically correct, and completely corporatized culture.
What was the weight of the part they rotated? This job looked pretty sketchy, but I guess they followed a precise procedure to make it happen :D It was a very well performed teamwork
I think I would rather do the job than watch you all working up there! Seen that clouds rolling in and thought "Time you weren't there!" It's a job you need nice days for! Good to see it though, it is a job that most couldn't do :-))
Talk about trust in the gear you are using eg the high lift crane its not going to fail and if it does you wont even know about it ,professionals in action and a team that doesn't even on an individual 2 team basis look around and see if their fellow team members are there you just know they are, kudos to crane operator also the first link in the chain job well done , enough said ,hello from Australia....@25:59 we have gone 2 far its time to get some bolts in this ......................
Semi-rigid coaxial cable. Think of them as the same kind of coaxial cable you use at your house on your TV, because it is the exact same, except larger.
Was the antenna installed with the wrong orientation? Seems it would have been fixed long before the hardware corroded. Would love to know the reL story.
@@59phonebone Maybe the city grew out in a direction that the antenna wasn't originally optimized to cover? Population centers can move quite a bit over the course of a few decades. If the broadcaster's target market had shifted it would explain the need to adjust the antenna's aim. I'm just speculating here, and I have no familiarity with this area, so I might be totally wrong.
180 degrees makes no sense You have 2 sets of directional antennas, which I don't know why they have those instead of Uni directional antenna, but turning it 180 puts the antenna elements back in the same place as before. Unless there are only elements on one side None of this makes sense You could swap the inputs and get the same results
We don't know enough about the antenna's design or the system's previous configuration, the exact result desired, and/or the effects of geography on signals from the location, to second guess the engineering behind the change. This kind of job is so expensive to undertake that nothing involved was included just for the sake of spits and wiggles.
No. Too many assumptions on your part. Antennas such as this adjust the radiation patterns in several ways. Slots on the radiators, directors and reflectors, outphasing of antenna elements, mechanical beam tilt, even horizontal vs vertical propagation. it is very complicated. Shapes of antenna patterns range from a big circle to cardioid, hyper cardioid, and more, some look like a stepped on blintz. All dictated by signal strength desired in one direction or the other, Do a little research on directional antennas and design. Be prepared for a shitload of math.
These are the unsung Heroes of Broadcasting and ill bet they don,t get the big money the so called stars of radio and television get ,These are the real heroes .
Of course they don't...they actually work for a living!
@@johnburns6422 oh they got the big money don't fool yourself. Anyone risking life and limb like that gets paid very well
I have nothing but 100% respect for people that perform jobs of this nature. I worked in a chemical plant and have been 200 feet on distillation columns so I have a rough idea of what they do.
It’s Blue Collar Workers like these guys that Make 🇺🇸 Great…. Kudos 👍👍 to the 4 in the Air and their support guy on the ground…👍👍
I'm going to get a full body harness to wear while I watch vids like this
I once ripped the fabric off the recliner arm trying to hang on. I would feel better tied in to the chair. 😂
welded my safety harness to the chair which was then also welded to the ground lol
I used to do this, things are alot easier doing work down from the top of the tower once there's a gin pole involved its a whole lot more work and alot more dangerous mad respect for these guys
I never have seen a gin pole, immediately thought that's a very intelligent design/work aid.
I imagine the guys really good at working from these heights don't brag about it much. Thanks for posting. Awesome video.
The ones that do probably don't last long. They get asked to do one sketchy assignment and they quit and go get a job touching the dirt!
I'm a crane operator, I don't mind heights, as long as I'm looking UP at them. Those guys are CRAZY!
Especially that dork without a shirt that hangs out of the basket. I bet he shows this video to every chick he meets.
As GrandMa used to encourage me when young..."BOY, you sure got that $#!t right!!!"
I've got the exact pair of blue handled grips in my toolbag , but the highest they have ever been or ever likely to go is 25 feet ,,, I feel proud of myself for just watching the whole video ,,jeez these guys are really something ,,they have my full admiration,,
Mad respect, i hate to do this kind of metal&metal bolts,heavy weights works on the ground, cant imagine the patience to do it in a way like that above the clouds, no time for a coffee and very limited space to lay of your tools and confined by safetly lines etc. Stay safe and thanks for the work.
Just before they head down after finishing they get an "Oh, wait a second. While you're up there can you change the light bulb?"
How many Russian Choristers does it take to change a light bulb? One thousand. One chorister to change the bulb and 999 choristors to sing the praises of the heroic deeds of the deceased bulb.
About 30 years ago, I had a client who changed bulbs on towers for his living. Seems like he told me $1/foot...one way!
@@WA4RRN I had a guy about 40 years ago change the lamps on my station's 1200' tower for a few hundred $$. Back then tower guys were paid crap, no benefits, etc. Late 90's things started to improve. Later on we had 40 or so TV stations and I kept most of the business with two tower outfits. One was a super pro from Texas. The best. No shortcuts. And there were some that after they got off the tower I would never let do any work for our stations again they were risk-takers. Zero room for that. One group did a great job around 1990 changing an antenna for me. Rewarded the whole crew, their wives and kids - yeah, one guy brought his wife to jobs, and another had a little girl he had custody of and she came to the jobs, the wife of the other "home schooled" the girl on the road. Amazing guys that really are the unsung heros.
Climber 1: “Okay, hand me the new light bulb.”
-
Climber 2: “I thought YOU had it!”
-
Climber 1: “BRB.”
You feel like you are up there with them and my fear of heights make my palms sweat.
I worked in construction for many years. Whenever we saw the "Iron Workers" come onto to the site and do what they do,
we were always amazed and in awe of their Fearlessness. These guys are more fearless!
You lose your depth perception at about 100ft. So it is just a bit windier higher up. I have been climbing up to 200m, and it did feel safer than some small towers with fewer security measures.
@@la7dfa your right, I’ve been up a few times, after 100’ feet it’s not much different. Looking down an elevator shaft is pretty wild too.
I helped erect free standing towers back in the 80's for att and we build them in sections on the ground we took 2 cranes and flip them upright then we took the crawler crane then we stacked them one on top the other highest I went was 300 and 5 feet. We had a winch truck and block and tackled the microwave dishes to the tower.
@@skipjack5964 Thanks for input. In Houston, TX many towers are located in one particular area. Many years ago a tower was being erected. A local
resident happened to be filming the job. What he captured was a Horrific and Tragic accident. As 1 of the final section was being hoisted up several
hundred feet up. A bracket on the cable failed. There workers on the section, sadly they did not survive. I will Always have a deep respect for Tower Workers.
For several years I worked on towers up to 304'. I'm sure climbing this antenna's height could seem scarier, but if there was a vertical velocity mishap, the results would be similar and final. Nice view from near the apex...
The pucker factor is off the scale.
You ain't kidding! I'm afraid I'm gonna be at full clench for the rest of the day now after watching this one!
No...not even once..utmost respect to all who do this.
I knew a guy who ran an installation crew. When he was in Africa doing a job, Orangutangs would come out of the jungle to see what was going on. Eventually they climbed on the tower and hung out with the crew, just hanging by their arms, swinging and swaying at 1000 feet up. No fear. He said, "I wanted to give them wrenches and get them to work, they were naturals."
There are no orangutangs in Africa.
I was about to mention that but you beat me to it. Sumatra and borneo. Hehe. None in Africa. Haha
@@tedc7714 Unless they are in a zoo.
BULLMOOSE PRODUCTIONS...That is freaking awesome! Love the tribute to the Bullmoose himself, Teddy Roosevelt! 🇺🇲🇺🇸🇺🇸
Rigging the gin pole always amazed me. Years back we'd ride the tugger basket, it was air operated, had a friction brake the tugger operator controlled so you talked real nice to him unless you had new kid in the basket you wanted to scare the piss out of.
It's amazing these towers can hold so much and carry these guys on that also. Prolly cause the only thing they carry is a lack of fear. Yall rock.
I know that having the tools tethered would slow things down and be a pain but the possibility of one falling is certainly increased with no tether...dangerous. Gotta hand it to iron workers though, fearless!
The people who do this work ( TV broadcast towers) are a exclusive club.
I gotta give huge credit to these guys. I’ll fly open cockpit biplanes and things like that no problem, but this. I don’t think I could do what these guys do.
We do work on LMR sites 300 ft or less and watching these guys use a gin pole at 1000ft is wild to me... Shout out to the guy with no shirt on, no hiding from the sun at 1000ft.
So cool to have the basket travel up a guy wire like that - saves the guys climbing so much!
Not up a guy wire. It's a tag line rigged to the tower along with the load line.
Traveling up a guy wire adds too much off axis load. One man alone can for repair or inspection but not that much weight
Florida man doing the job in Beach Shorts.
Great work! Thanks for filming and sharing this. I bet the worst part was putting those fibre glass panels back over the sector antennas!
There is no film involved. It's an electronic camera.
Thanks for the correction. I’m just off to hoover the front room.
Using an electronic camera, recording on memory media. No film was involved. Thus, not filming. Recording.
@@MikeDentWith a Dyson, no doubt
@@MikeDentDo you Ford over to the store?
These men (and women, if there are any) earn Every penny - and I hope it's a bunch. Even the hoist operator as he has to be on his toes all the time too. I sometimes get woozy looking down at my shoestrings!
That belch at 8:30 tho, bet it was heard five miles away !
Compliments from a retired rigger who can relate to this. Watch one helicopter project I was on. Top off kaukau 1990.
My friend also told me about some instances of what happens if they accidently drop a wrence or a nut or bolt.If dropped, they yell "headache", so that noone under them looks up. He said one guy caught a 9/16 wrench across his face and it opened up real good. Another time, someone dropped a wrench, and it hit someones car parked at the bottom, and went through the engine.
When I and my crew were rigging a weather tower on Vandenberg AFB in the mid-eighties, we had a very young and green junior (his first job out of school) engineer who wouldn't climb and basically tagged along, milling about smartly down on the terra firma.
It took about 20 min. to reach the top at 304'. When we got about half way up he would try to take a nap in the Dodge Prospector work vehicle. Nope, about every ten minutes he got a wake up call with a golf ball sized piece of duct seal to the roof of the vehicle. Rang like a bell and so did he. He had a good sense of humor though, so it was all in good fun. And yes it was done safely, the truck and its contents survived.
There is no way it went through the engine. Maybe through the engine bay, but it’s not going to make it through an engine. Terminal velocity is around 130 mph.
The weight of a chrome plated 9/16 open end box wrench must be around a 1/2 pound, now at 130 mph, someone would have to calculate the kinetic energy of such a wrench and then calculate the strength of a cast iron engine block, and of course the engine is only so thick in places..... just relaying what they said, I was not there.@@The_Red_Off_Road
*no *one . Two words. Noone is the lead singer for, 'Herman's Hermits.' Peter Noone.
@@joeanon5788 130 mph = 209 kph = 209.000 / 3600 = 58 m/s; the wrench weighs 0.250 kg
Ekin = 1/2 * m * v^2
Ekin = 1/2 * 0,25 kg * 58^2 m/s
Ekin = 420,5 Joule
That's the energy of a 9mm bullet. That's enough to penetrate an aluminum engine block.
Jumping the pole. Whoop ! Coming up easy. When the squeeling stops. Uh hold your load operator. Something is hung up. Bang! Bang! Coming down easy !!
What crews actually use whoop and bangbang? None of my riggers on two 1500 footers did or had heard of that, other than some tv show.
@@The_DuMont_Network Tower King II. I've personally heard Kevin Barber and his crew use these exact words on numerous occasions, including "waaaah" for stop.
had to strap myself to my arm chair watching this :)
that was great to watch wow nuts to be up that high !!!
I had to re-watch the start of the video because I didn't really grasp how that yellow extension was attached and raised. Now I get the idea, but there should have been more video covering how it got up there.
You'll have a climber most likely climb the entire way with a rope and at some point you split the weight like when you climb your partner lifts up the rope beneath him so you're only climbing with 100 feet worth of weight instead of 300 feet
Someone will also climb with a block, which the rope slides through. Then they'll rig cable to the rope, replace the block for the one with the cable and hoist the gin pole up, I don't know the rest as I've not worked with gin poles but getting it up there would be the same as hoisting other objects.
I was thinking the same
That lift must be strong carrying all of the weight of those guys massive balls into the sky. In all seriousness those in this profession are greatly appreciated heroes. Communications is what drives this world.
I would not have been able to move even one finger at that height. Frozen in fear!
Its definitely not for everyone, that's for sure. I was a rigger for several years, and whats crazy is before that, I had an intense fear of heights. I got over it tho with some "exposure therapy", and I really enjoyed my time working in the sky. Learning how to completely trust your harness, and understanding that its going to do exactly what its supposed to do, and its not going to allow you to fall, was a big part of me being able to calmly and confidently work several hundred feet in the air.
Once you are above 20 feet it does not matter how high you go… a fall is gonna kill you. My grand father and father were both iron workers. My grandfather had incredible balance. Even a 70 he could walk a chain link fence. He worked before OSHA and all the safety regulations. It was each man for himself. There were lots of black stamps in his union book (they signified a payment into a fund to payout to a dead man’s family). They paid with their bodies… both had multiple surgeries to repair their backs and necks by the time they retired. But it was damn good paying work, especially during the depression for my grandfather.
"How was your day, hon?"
"Oh, you know, the usual. Got hoisted up in a cage to the stratosphere, and stuff. What's for dinner?"
I get the willies watching tower people work on these things.
That’s was crazy!! Have y’all ever done this exact type of thing before?? You probably make great pay but it’s not enough!!!
9:12 100% safe just went out the window 🤣🤣🤣 ... There was probably a safety man with binoculars couple miles down the road having a stroke 🤣🤣🤣 ... Be safe man
Yeah, that was pretty stupid. Unless he had another tether below we can’t see, in which case it’s not too bad buttt doesn’t seem like it lol
he snapped onto the cable of the basket
I'd have a real hard time trusting my life to a single discolored steel cable..
I did this for 10+ yrs. Took me all over the world
I built a 1200 foot tower in Florida for branch erection it had a 360 platform All sections came from FT WORTH tower. I loved building towers in Florida. 🤠👍
Bravo
Flip you a fish
You built or did you help build
This is horrifying! I feel like I'm going to have a heart attack just watching this.
Two concerns (1) still seeing lots of corrosion near and at the joint. Thought they said they were removing it? (2) Those bolts have to have a torque spec. Who is measuring it? Banging on a wrench with a hammer doesn't really torque anything.
Shut up
I was also curious why it appears they aren't measuring torque...just setting it tight and assuming it's right seems a bit sketchy.
There’s only one torque setting for those bolts , TAF
I'm amazed you're not the supervisor, oh I forgot you're in mommy's basement on the computer night and day
@@MikeDent rotflmfao !
We had to do this all the time, to the TV antenna on the roof - but not since we got cable.
Scary. But not scarier than the lady standing on top of the Burj Khalifa for a tourism ad. I bet she was thinking "Can't this just be done with CGI?"
The drone vs. Falcon races held there were really cool. Racing from the top to the ground, I think the Falcons always won those events.
Goes to show you, Man will race just about anything that moves against just about anything else that moves. And place wagers on the outcome lol.
I stopped watching it for about 5 minutes and then came back, To post this message. Everybody that reads my comment should do this.
If you want to know just how dangerous climbing towers really is then do this. Google these words.
“ what is the percentage of death pertaining to men that climb towers for a living?”
Also this. “About how many men die each year that are TOWER CLIMBERS????”
Is the google smart enough to overlook obvious grammatical errors like that, or do we need to put it through a moron-to-English interpreter first?
That antenna will make hundreds of millions of dollars.
🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Excellent FE proof video.
😉
Now that is the job I want!
I did this for 13 years and even though I miss the work life I don't miss the partying life that came with it 😔😔😔... Is that Barry Oliver aka " Uncle Barry " at 7:12 ???
did you say that backwards?
I had a tower company come to my house to repair my ham radio antenna that a hurricane twisted.
They were only up about 60'. I ask if they had been on any tall towers lately. They said they just came from a 2,000' tower South
of Houston.
they were full of shit. nobody working residential gets to work on towers that big
@@EricCampbellUAV My tower is about 60' but the tower company works on commercial towers that are up to 2,000'. We have those tall towers South of Houston called the Senior Road Tower sites. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Road_Tower
They did me a favor when they came out and readjusted my tower after a hurricane. The company is called OTS Quality Tower Services here in I believe Rosenburg, Texas just South West of Houston.
@@EricCampbellUAV I have a 40' tower at home which I erected myself, and I sometimes go up the 1997' tower for work. You were saying?
The direction of the antenna is rotated, this is a mistake at the beginning of the first installation or something else. It would be strange if there was an error in the direction of the antenna and it was corrected later
Rotating the antenna? Re-directing the radiation pattern? How many degrees was it "clocked"?
thats a whole new meaning to having guts !!!!!
I just hope it worked out for the station and put some better OTA signal over the areas where people live and not so much over the Everglades Aligators don't buy much from local advertizers.
Excellent video. Wish I had been up there.
wtf after watching this I'll never be right again lol Though never was to start with 🍺🤣👍 amazing job!
I have crazy respect for these guys, they are THE Few. Everytime I drive to work, I drive past 3 of these monsters and I often look at the top and think, someone's climbed up there. Insane to me, but to those guys and girls, it's just another day at work.
Sidenote: 15:48 you can just see the curvature of the Earth! Amazing.
I always hope to see someone working up there when I drive by. How often do crews go up on antennas?
Easy. Don't want to anger the Flat Earthers. Lol!
At least the platform makes it easier than climbing all the way. And provides stability. Tough job but looks like fun.
I can tell this is a pretty cool job
I met up with two crews doing work to the transmitter tower here in U.K. at Croydon - not so famous as the one a few miles away at Crystal Palace, London but probably serves more people through the many signals sent out. Despite being sited on hills, both of these installations are babies compared with this one! Great work between all the guys - I was wondering how much load that derrick rig would take especially has its head block would never reach directly over the antenna - some deft chain block pulling going on. That mounting plate is some piece of kit compared with the tower sections eh?
Bolts up nuts out guys.
is this yellow structure that lifts the men up there permanent? Or was it fixed to the antenna for the ourpose of this job and will later be removed? At 8:25 I can see the beginning of this structure, but I still can`t figure out wether this is a permanent part of the antenna (for maintenence) or not.
The yellow structure is a gin pole. They are temporary and consist of one or more sections. In this instance, the gin pole is used to secure the antenna in place. General information at wirelessestimator.com/content/industryinfo/317
Were you guys using the come a longs to break out all the throughbolts? Couldn't you just cut all the heads off and knock the bolts out?
On a Harris antenna the multi couple sits below the beacon plate which is a pain in the nads.
Harris has not made broadcast television antennas for decades. It is highly improbable that there are any still in use.
It's good to see they're wearing hard hats in case they fall.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Have any of your viewers heard of a U.K steeplejack called Fred Dibnah who used to demolish chimneys by setting them on fire. Ha passed away in 2002, videos are on CZcams well worth watching.
While the guys in this video certainly aren't afraid of heights, I'm afraid they'll never quite compare to the absolute legend of a man that was the late great Fred Dibnah. They don't make men like Fred Dibnah anymore. And perhaps that is for the best. I'm afraid men like Fred, and other larger than life characters of legend, would not fare well living under the constraints of today's uptight, safety first, politically correct, and completely corporatized culture.
What was the weight of the part they rotated? This job looked pretty sketchy, but I guess they followed a precise procedure to make it happen :D It was a very well performed teamwork
8 tons.
I think I would rather do the job than watch you all working up there! Seen that clouds rolling in and thought "Time you weren't there!" It's a job you need nice days for! Good to see it though, it is a job that most couldn't do :-))
Actually, work was stopped twice due to lightning in the area.
Summer in Florida - It's gonna rain...
@@abovetheclouds2159 yeah i was just thinking thats probably pretty common there in Florida.
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@@abovetheclouds2159
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Talk about trust in the gear you are using eg the high lift crane its not going to fail and if it does you wont even know about it ,professionals in action and a team that doesn't even on an individual 2 team basis look around and see if their fellow team members are there you just know they are, kudos to crane operator also the first link in the chain job well done , enough said ,hello from Australia....@25:59 we have gone 2 far its time to get some bolts in this ......................
I would love that job!, that's something I would enjoy so much I'd never miss a day of work!!.
Go apply then
@@justiceBustamante yeah u cant just want to do it, you gotta have brains
Crazy operation!
Antenna rotation? Should you rotate your antennas periodically for even wear . . . like car tires?
What company do you guys work for? I would love to get in to working on antennas. Especially in Florida.
That there is what ya call the wedding cake. Get ya some of that !!
B*lls of steel is what these guys have. It should be a name your price job. Much respect.
No way y’all are posting so many violations 😭 my boss would be pisseddd
I've used a slugging spanner to take off a nut; never to put one on.
What are the black tubes that run down the center of the tower?
Transmission lines - routing for the signal the antenna is broadcasting.
Transmission lines for feeding the signal (Radio Frequency energy) from the transmitter in the building to the antenna. Think of them as signal pipes.
@@The_DuMont_Network thank you 😊
Semi-rigid coaxial cable. Think of them as the same kind of coaxial cable you use at your house on your TV, because it is the exact same, except larger.
Who put it on backwards in the first place 🤣🤣
It is only backwards in the morning, by the time the afternoon comes, the world has turned enough for it to be facing the right way !
It's never the fall that kills you.... it's the sudden stop!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
The hoist must be rated at 50 tons or so to pick up the tremendous weight of their balls.
It looks like one of the guys on your crew may be able to reach up and do the job without a crane.
Good job, work safetly always.
Prob call it a Gin pole, cos you'd wanna consume an entire bottle of Gin after a day working on one.
And I get giddy on a thick carpet.
Very well done! 👏 Subbed.☘️👍
What I don't see here is anything about why they were rotating the antenna. Did it get installed oriented incorrectly?
There is absolutely no other reason to rotate an antenna other than it was not rotated properly to begin with.
Was the antenna installed with the wrong orientation? Seems it would have been fixed long before the hardware corroded. Would love to know the reL story.
Very well built tower because it can support the weight of multiple pairs of huge heavy balls.
Balls of TITANIUM!! 😅
I been 100 feet on a pole with the old school safety with no fall protection, but that was high enough, I'm good.
The question I've never seen asked here is WHY did the Antenna need to be rotated?
Description says needed for better reception into W Palm Beach.. Okay, so was it installed backwards originally? 😅
@@59phonebone Maybe the city grew out in a direction that the antenna wasn't originally optimized to cover? Population centers can move quite a bit over the course of a few decades. If the broadcaster's target market had shifted it would explain the need to adjust the antenna's aim. I'm just speculating here, and I have no familiarity with this area, so I might be totally wrong.
Just cant imagine what happens if you drop a bolt or a hammer from the top 😅
It's all fun and games until the air temp drops below freezing. No thanks!
And my word if they're Above the Clouds shouldn't the air and oxygen be much thinner?
Not enough money on earth to get me up there.
180 degrees makes no sense
You have 2 sets of directional antennas, which I don't know why they have those instead of Uni directional antenna, but turning it 180 puts the antenna elements back in the same place as before.
Unless there are only elements on one side
None of this makes sense
You could swap the inputs and get the same results
We don't know enough about the antenna's design or the system's previous configuration, the exact result desired, and/or the effects of geography on signals from the location, to second guess the engineering behind the change. This kind of job is so expensive to undertake that nothing involved was included just for the sake of spits and wiggles.
No. Too many assumptions on your part. Antennas such as this adjust the radiation patterns in several ways. Slots on the radiators, directors and reflectors, outphasing of antenna elements, mechanical beam tilt, even horizontal vs vertical propagation. it is very complicated. Shapes of antenna patterns range from a big circle to cardioid, hyper cardioid, and more, some look like a stepped on blintz. All dictated by signal strength desired in one direction or the other, Do a little research on directional antennas and design. Be prepared for a shitload of math.
AH you whooped. I miss talking like that.
My recliner moved and I about pissed myself
turning antenna so Wellington will have a clearer picture for the PGA😅