Ham Radio Tower Pictures

The two guys came up the driveway on the cherry picker, leaving the truck and trailer on the street in front of our property.

They had tricky negotiating of the cherry picker to get across the back yard and into the pasture area on the east side of the house close to the greenhouse.

You can see he had to go between the trio of evergreens (which we cut back severely) and the brick planter with iris in the planter and a metal bird flying on top.

One of the hardest parts of the job was getting into position to push the tower up. It took a lot of doing, with the cherry picker not cooperating at times, but he finally managed to put the edge of the basket (with him in it) right under the tower just past the antenna.

I don’t usually think much of tattoos – and particularly ‘sleeve’ tattoos – but this guy made me rethink the issue. He has arms that won’t quit with lots of muscles. Hey, I may be old, but I ain’t dead yet! :0)

They got the edge of the basket right under the tower and proceeded to slowly move away from the top, move the basket to stay under the tower, then move some more…

Here we’re about half way up. Each time they moved, they ran the risk of shoving the tower out of position. It could have been ripped from the iron plate that held one side to the concrete pad, but these guys are amazing.

It came up inches at a time while one of the guys and my husband tried to get it into position where my husband could attach the last bolt to hold the tower on the pad.

And the tower is bolted down! My husband immediately went through the barbed wire fence to secure the hardest guy wire to reach, and then the 2 others.

Here’s one of the guy wires. We have three, each 30 feet from the base, tied down securely, plus our dog, Molly, checking things out.

This is a close up of the tie downs on the guy wires.  I then put surveyor’s tape by the stake, where the tie down is finished, and then as far up as I could reach on the guy wire so we can readily see them when we try to mow or weed whack. I’ll also re-spray the actual stakes with neon paint so they show up clearly.

This is the base of the tower with the last bolt in. Technically, we could get our cherry picker guys back if we needed to take the tower down for repairs or any other reason, but I hope we never do.

My husband is out now, figuring out how to support the two cable runs that go from the tower to the house – one for the rotor and the other for the antenna. I just helped him tape the cables to the first support. He ran the cables through heavy plastic tubing around each cable, then taped to a metal support pole. He’s going to make another support from angle iron to be attached to a telephone pole, and then may need one more before the cables come to the house. This part seems easy, compared to all that has gone before and the actual pushing up of the tower!