Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb

More terrifying and yet unseen .. the cameraman had to hump his gear past the overhang to film Noakes arriving .. and those 50+ year old cameras weren't GoPro's or iPhones.

People who work at heights usually have just enough fear of heights to not do something stupid. Those with no fear of heights tend to make fatal mistakes.

Source: 35 years of climbing and 10 years of industrial rope access :-)

I'd say their balls have a relative density in between bromine and tungsten. Uranium = customer service roles.

I'm a rock climber, not a tower climber, but I've been on climbs that are >1k feet above the deck. For me (and I gather most climbers), just hanging off an anchor at 1000 feet doesn't feel particularly scary. You're firmly attached to the rock with gear that you (hopefully) trust. For a tower, I'd expect it to feel even safer since the gear will be far more solid than some cams[0] jammed in a crack.

I (along with most climbers) still feel fear though! But it's specifically fear of _falling_ rather than just fear of being high up. In climbing, that comes when you _lead_ past your point of protection (where your rope is attached to the rock), creating the possibility of falling >2x that distance. In big wall climbing you might climb 10-50 feet before placing protection, so you are risking a potentially very big fall.

In tower climbing falls aren't possible (unless you screw up the system), because you are always clipped into at least one point of protection. I'd imagine that it feels more grueling than terrifying for most people comfortable with the heights.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-loaded_camming_device

I'm a longtime rock climber and climbed a tower professionally back in another life. With most things, it's practice with the gear that builds trust in your system. I can do most anything at a height these days because I know that I'm safe; it lets me push that lizard brain feeling away. I similarly experienced this learning to SCUBA dive a few years ago - it's horrifying! But the more time spent doing the thing, practicing the systems, failure modes, etc... let me relax and enjoy the fish rather than freaking out that I'm 70' underwater.

Climber: I've climbed about 3000' above the ground and didn't feel a drop of fear during it. And then, at the top, after removing my harness, I scooched out on a rock that lets you see all the way down what we had just climbed, and holy cow was I nervous!

I think you learn over time that you can trust the gear/ partner / your judgement and technique. But that doesn't make all fear related to climbing disappear. There are situations in which fear is appropriate and I've been quite scared in them.

I've also done a lot of rock climbing. As other replies said, you get comfortable with the gear and the height and loose the fear.

When Covid broke my regular climbing habit. One interesting part of going back to it after a year or so of not climbing - I felt some fear of heights again.

It was mild fear, and didn't have me to hanging on extra tight or something. I remember the odd sensation of observing this fear in myself and thinking something along the lines "Oh that's weird, fear of heights - I don't remember the last time I had this."

Like a muscle, if you start training to be comfortable again it seems to come back quicker if you had trained it well previously. I guess fears have homeostasis too.

I climbed about 250' at highest, working for a WISP about 6-7 years ago.

The first climb, I got about 75 feet up. My body froze to the tower. I watched as I told myself in my mind 'go. Continue climbing.', and my body refused to budge. It was pretty surreal. After a bit of this back and forth I gave up and climbed back down. The boss told me "it's alright, everyone does that."

The next day I went up to the top of that one, 200' up. It's terrifying at times but it gets easier. It never got easy though, and I quit after just a few months. I thought about my wife and kids everytime I went up, and how if I splattered they would be devastated.

Pretty early on I dropped a nice Dewalt cordless drill. I was 150 or 200' up and I thought to myself "is that thing ever going to hit the ground?" I didn't even hear it impact, but could see it explode into a few pieces. Must have been a windy day.

As a person that hires tower service companies, I seriously would not recommend it as an entry level employee... The pay is horrible, the benefits suck, you'll be travelling 75%+ of the time. The bar to entry is very low if you're physically fit. If you don't have any DUIs and can pass a drug screen you are already ahead of many candidates. Most of the recruiting takes placein social media these days, for instance there's probably 20 or so tower climber related groups on Facebook.

One of the reasons for the extensive use of social media is that to put it as politely as possible, the talent pool they're recruiting from are not highly educated, often don't own laptops or any device other than their phone. Many cannot put together a grammatically correct cover letter or CV. There is a very high turn over rate in people with less than 2 years experience. You will be working with (and sharing the cheapest possible motel rooms with) some very crude and uneducated individuals, with whom you might have nothing in common. All that for a rate of pay about the same as Dicks Burgers pays in Seattle to literally flip a burger, and Dicks has much better benefits.

The majority of the work will be mundane cellular tower and monopole stuff, unless you are hired by one of the more rare and specialized broadcast industry tower companies. The tower erection specialists are also a whole different ball game from the cellular industry contractors and subs.

The industry in general is a frustrating race to the bottom in subcontractors, turf vendors, subs of subs, unpaid invoices, and similar. It's very much like getting into any other hard labor construction job like roofing.

For the person in the thread here that said drones can only fly to 400 ft, not quite, the faa has specifically addressed this.

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https://pilotinstitute.com/drone-altitute/

The relevant rules under Part 107 are summarized within Section 107.51. This section is entitled “Operating limitations for small unmanned aircraft” and contains a set of limits associated with speed, altitude, and visibility. Pertaining to altitude, item B of the Section states that:

“The altitude of the small unmanned aircraft cannot be higher than 400 feet above ground level unless the small unmanned aircraft is (1) flown within a 400-foot radius of a structure, and (2) does not fly higher than 400 feet above the structure’s immediate uppermost limit.”

The wasps are of similar size to the wavelengths of 5 Ghz RF frequencies. It seems plausible that they experience the absorbed energy quite differently.

Maybe it's like a pleasant warmth from within and they just fly towards the direction of increasing warmth. I guess it wouldn't take many dBms of absorbed power to slightly heat a wasp.

It's a useful small tool for low cost Ethernet bridges but a sub $200 ubiquiti 802.11ac point to point bridge is not a high powered radio, electrically they max out at something like 200 milliwatts, the rest of the eirp comes from the gain of the antenna.

Some very large towers do indeed have platforms at the top. And some even have elevators.

But the vast majority do not. Very expensive to build.