This video did the rounds many years ago now, still quite an uncomfortable watch especially when he gets to the top! I understand they don't allow 'free climbing' any more... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgO4Gd4RhvM
I free climbed radio towers on mesa's in the Pilbara as part of work experience in high school .. bit before health and safety was a thing.
The steeplejack work of Fred Dibnah is quite a thing to watch.
yes indeed, and any English person of the appropriate age will have seen children's TV present John Noakes climbing Nelson's Column and then going over the edge in a bosun's chair to clean it, with no harness, utterly terrifying!
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.
Yes! You do see him standing at the top in one of the long shots. Terry Doe, interviewed briefly in this documentary about Noakes: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6c72u3
The Fred Dibnah stuff is some of the most impressive stuff I've seen, not just the scaling heights but the logistics of building the ladders as he went, and the demolition of large brick structures with a minimum of tools.
This makes me physically very uncomfortable to watch. What a thrill.
Also a movie, Fall:
Haha a lot like the flick where the guy is trapped in a phone booth for the entire movie.
This video was how I started to challenge my fear of heights, watching it over and over until I got desensitized, then found hundreds more similar videos and did the same, eventually getting obsessed with rock climbing movies, which taught me a lot. I haven't been able to actually climb since then due to injuries but the whole thing changed my life and made facing fears and working on myself in general a standard thing I just do now.
Check out the rooftoppers who climb cranes too btw. Beautiful views. Risky stuff.
Obligatory Man On Wire reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Wire
Incredible and unusual documentary, not too much vertigo. It's essentially like a bank heist movie.
I am afraid of heights. I had to go back halfway through going up the Eiffel tower.
Jesus fuck this video has me on edge. I don't know what moved me to click that link, haha.
These people have balls of tungsten, that's for sure.
These people presumably aren’t scared of heights, so I’m not sure we can really comment on their balls
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 :-)
To quote Jim Whitaker, once upon a time a famous climber and founder of a well known mountain guide company, "If you're not afraid of heights, I don't want to be on the mountain with you".
Hi, I've considered changing careers to rope access or similar for a while now. Can I interview you about your job? Please email me, see profile. (This request extends to other RATs reading this too!)
No problem, I've sent you an email.
I'd say their balls have a relative density in between bromine and tungsten. Uranium = customer service roles.
Try watching this guys Insta videos: @alainrobertofficial
He's a French guy famous for free-soloing skyscrapers. I don't have a particular fear of heights but I nope out of some of his videos pretty quickly.
Is not the height that gets me, it is the edges!
He sort of touched on this, but an aspect of tower rigging that most people don’t think about is how long it can take to climb a tower when you are the first one up with the line. It’s absolutely exhausting work.
Another side fact, wasps are attracted to building nests on the towers for some reason. I never knew if it was all the EM radiation being put off or just the heat.
I used to do this and, for me, the time it took was entirely dependent on the gear I was provided and whether the climb was enjoyable. The gear isn’t exactly what you think of when you think climbing gear and, frankly, it’s infuriating. It might be manufactured by Petzl but the weight and utility are terrible relative to their alpine and mountaineering products. Hell, I was expected to wear work boots that were extremely heavy and climbed poorly. As far as scenery, everyone, myself included, would treat these climbs as climbs and would enjoy ourselves if the views were scenic. The work itself wasn’t hard relative to the trips we were guiding during the climbing season.
To what extent do people in this line of work feel fear as they do it? Is it mainly suitable for those rare people who either don’t feel fear, or the less-rare people who are looking for a rush, or does it just become mundane after sufficient experience, so that really anyone can do it?
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
Having worked on airplane design, I would never want to trust my life to a single piece of equipment - a single rope, a single clip, a single anchor point. I'd want a backup. It's hard to tell if those are fine, or one tug away from failure.
In climbing, most of our gear is redundant. Anchors are built from at least two pieces (but ideally more), our harnesses have two tie-in points, and modern belay devices rely on both a camming mechanism and a brake hand.
But there are still single points of failure. In particular, the rope. It’s not practical to bring up two full strength (single) ropes on climbs. Failures are very rare but do happen—generally because a rope is cut by a sharp rock.
Climbing is inherently dangerous, but accidents related to gear failure are extremely rare. The most common cause of death is human error (particularly on repels), followed by environmental factors like rock fall.
Do they make 'double' rope? I know there is the internal structure and the external protection but I'm thinking something more like two independent internal structures such that if one fails the other can still handle load, and just as importantly it's obvious when the rope is in this state so nobody starts with it that way - it's only as the last line of defense.
I don't know of anything quite like what you're describing, but there are "half" or "twin" ropes, which are meant to be used as a pair. They're each thinner and lighter than ropes rated as "single" ropes, but together are considered as strong.
Thanks for the info. I do realize that weight would make some redundancies impractical.
There's a saying, though, among engineers - they can fix anything but the nut behind the wheel!
I was thinking the same about rock climbing vs tower climbing -- I don't find rock climbing very scary because I'm always on a rope. In the YT video above[0] though, that guy doesn't appear to be tied into anything, except a carabiner he momentarily attaches once or twice for a rest and then takes back off when he resumes!! Incomprehensible! I'd be petrified :O
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.
I tried scuba diving. At 30 feet underwater, I felt a constant bubbling panic that took a great deal of effort to push back on. I suppose I would eventually get accustomed to it, but that was the first and last scuba dive for me.
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.
How would someone get into this work?
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.
====
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.”
Just as a note, the majority of the climbing industry is probably as you say (I'm not an expert in it by any means!), but the guys featured in this post are both pros at ERI who work on some of the more interesting projects. Still, to me one of the bigger downsides is the travel...
Being on the road 50+% of the time (usually more) takes a toll!
With drones being so accessible, a lot of the smaller climbing projects are no longer necessary, when it's just inspecting the top of a small tower with simple antennas.
Decades ago, I would show up for work on Monday morning with my suitcase in the trunk of my car cause I knew that as soon as I walked in the door I would be told I'd be flying out somewhere that morning.
I'll never forget the day I was driving down the road--less than half a mile from my apartment--and making a left turn when, for a couple of seconds, I couldn't remember what town I was in.
Really big broadcast towers are a specialized niche... Your average tower crew is working at 200' and less. Many will never see the absolutely huge gin poles used to send up gigantic VHF (fm and tv) band antennas. If I had to guess, crews and people who work on the 1000' class guyed towers are maybe 2-3% of the industry. Everyone else is cranking out new sectors with RRH on monopoles for cellular carriers.
Interesting to hear. There is a post doing the rounds on Insta where it shows a tower like the one in the video and says something like "You change a bulb on the top of this tower every 6 months and get $20k for doing it."
I guess that's not accurate then.
No it definitely is not. You absolutely could pay $20k as a client for two full business days of work on top of a 1000' broadcast tower by a crew of four guys, repairing/modifying/replacing things, but not for just changing the bulb. If the obstruction lighting needed more labor intensive repairs or replacement you could easily spend more than $20k for a more complicated project. That video and social media post are a well known trope in the industry.
Haha. I bet they must hate it when they see those videos.
Sort of surprised to hear that there are enough people willing to climb and work on towers that the pay and benefits are so bad. I would have guessed it paid very well, and was likely unionized. You could not pay me enough to do it.
A radio antenna is semi open though.
The part 107 exam has a question about radio towers and the answer is 400 feet above with in 400 ft of the tower. Or up to the point you hit controlled airspace.
I would think in a trade like this you’d have your own climbing gear and be expected to maintain it. In many trades most of the tools are property of the workers themselves.
Almost certainly the heat.
I don't think it's the heat, rather, the wasps seem attracted to the radio wave EM radiation. I'm not sure why, but I've seen it first hand when turning on high powered outdoor point-to-point WiFi antennas (eg. airMAX LiteBeam 5AC). The moment I connected the power, several wasps immediately began crowding around the antenna.
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.
Monkeys like to be microwaved; may be a similar effect.
Humans, too: https://www.jospt.org/doi/10.2519/jospt.2012.3787
I remember treatments like these happened in GP's offices in the 1980s.
Very curious how you get IRB approval to microwave monkeys.
There is no IRB for monkeys.
The animal equivalent to an IRB is usually an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), but the laws they are subject to vary with jurisdiction, and their use is optional if your grant provider (i.e. NIH) or academic publisher do not require them.
I beg your pardon?
Try it: you'll see. Low power recommended.
Humans like to sit in saunas.
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.
You have to check out the author's other youtube videos exploring this tower in depth. Fascinating stuff!
I climbed a 200m+ radio tower when I was a kid. Started really early so no one would see me. Saw the sunrise at the top but still felt like summer night when I got down. Best view I’ve ever seen
My kids and I have watched tons of documentaries over the years. One they (and I) enjoyed very much was "World's Toughest Fixes", which was hosted by a rigger named Sean Riley. In episode (s1e6) he helps a crack team of guys replace the top broadcast pole (name?) at the top of a 2000ft antennae. It's really extraordinary how they are working above the top of the actual tower to replace the old pole with the new one.
His entire series was excellent, but the episode mentioned is here:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1339028/
(Series on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Toughest_Fixes)
I remember in high school having my Dad invite me to watch the process of installing the antenna with a gin pole. A fairly risky operation that requires a ton of planning, as you're lifting literal tons of metal up the side of a guyed mast, which is designed for straight-down loads, not loads hanging off the side!
It doesn't always go well, for example the Senior Road Tower collapse.
Cool
Rabbit Hole:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDLT_tower
> Replacement of the beacon bulb at the top of the digital tower was featured in an episode of World's Toughest Fixes in 2010.[6] In 2015, amateur drone video footage of a man changing the light bulb on the analog tower went viral attracting more than 19 million views on YouTube and garnering attention from CNN and a newspaper in Britain.[7][8][9] On learning of the drone footage, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) forbade any further flights; without its approval, drones are restricted by law to a ceiling of 400 feet (120 m), far lower than the height of the tower.[10]
And the referenced viral video ...
Why don't they design the towers so they can be laid down flat and fixed on the ground and then pushed back upright again?
I can’t tell if this is a serious question. Towers this size are built in place, being able to handle the strain of being lifted from horizontal would be wild. Much easier and cheaper to pay a climber.
Ok. Lowering a huge tower to the ground pretty silly. How about designing the array at the top as a platform that could be lowered. Too much extra weight/cost?
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.
If I think about all the things that ca go wrong with folding huge tower, sending people to climb one seems like a fair trade.
I'd assume physics are the biggest constraint here. Just look at the machinery and equipment needed to raise a falcon 9 which is "only" ~230 ft tall.
Because then you need a 1115 ft stretch of flat ground to lay it on?
Then make it collapse in a spiral. Then, assuming you can make it infinitely thin, you can collapse into an arbitrarily small area.
From the article: "Some broadcast engineering tasks are a bit too daunting for me to consider. Climbing the massive towers that power radio and TV stations is one of them!"
I work for a team in a government agency that does engineering support for RF based navigational aids. Because we're short staffed (Congress underfunds us), everyone fulfills more jobs than their official title. (There's an elastic clause in government worker job descriptions, "and other duties as assigned.")
Anyway. I live in fear of the day I'm called upon to climb a tower because they need me to do that. My regular job is software development! Obviously I'm not going to do it, but I'm unsure what my rights are / what will happen if and when I refuse. Unfortunately my position isn't union protected because my older peers didn't sign on when the (non-computer science) engineers did.
> everyone fulfills more jobs than their official title. (There's an elastic clause in government worker job descriptions, "and other duties as assigned.")
That's boilerplate language for pretty much every job description in the United States (which is where I'm guessing you are). It isn't unique to government jobs. Almost everybody that doesn't work under super-strict bureaucratic oversight has to do work that isn't explicitly called out in their job description.
> I live in fear of the day I'm called upon to climb a tower because they need me to do that. My regular job is software development!
Your boss isn't going to come to you saying "go climb a tower or ur fired lol" while pointing to that clause. Tower climbing requires many special considerations like training, permits, insurance, and so forth that you don't have. They will contract that work out or hire somebody to do it specifically at the appropriate rate.
> my position isn't union protected
Last I checked government positions have about half the turnover that private-sector ones do. You're already doing well as far as job security (reorgs, funding SNAFUs, furloughs, etc. excepted).
I can only infer how you came to any of the conclusions that you did in your post but it sounds like you might have uninformed coworkers saying these things. If this is the case then stop listening to them.
It's not hearsay; I have a few engineer coworkers whose original job and training wasn't in tower climbing who now climb a couple times a year as installations require. I have seen their Powerpoint presentations, with pictures. Two of them are older and experienced in RF/telecom, but I have one younger coworker who went to a site and was asked to climb a tower and just - did it.
One older coworker is quite enthusiastic about it (as a mechanical engineer, he designed some of the custom rigging), so perhaps this is a case where he does it because he wants to & demonstrated aptitude so they let him. He actually decided to on his own to stop when a recent near miss made him question "why the hell" he isn't leaving this to professional riggers.
I don't know how/why my younger engineer coworker ended up doing it. Both her parents are in this same field and I know she feels a lot of pressure to excel and not say no to things. And when we come out to help a site there's a lot of pressure to restore service. So she may have agreed or even volunteered but not for the right reasons.
It may though be a case where no one thought to mention to me that this isn't a required thing, that some are doing it because they want to, etc. My coworkers aren't always good at realizing what new employees don't know, and I'm not good at picking up nuance.
But I definitely was "voluntold" to go out to a site and cut cables, which is a specialty technique I'm not properly trained in and would've taken place outside in the elements. (Did I mention I'm a programmer, a profession I chose in part because it takes place indoors? I also have undiagnosed/self-diagnosed dyspraxia; it would have been a disaster.) Thankfully the trip got canceled for other reasons, but my point is I wasn't asked; I was just told we need to send someone so you're going.
Thats like being asked to fill in for the guy on the bomb squad who called in sick. Being forced to fill a role that is dangerous and for which you are untrained and unqualified sounds like grounds for a lawsuit.
Watching Fall (2022) made me extremely wary of these kind of stunts.
I had dismissed that movie, based on the previews, as just silly B-movie with better production. Is it actually good in the sense that the plot is plausible and the acting is decent?
It's a pretty bad movie with bad acting. I did like it for some of the height shots which can be dizzying (I had no issues with 20-30m indoor climbing walls).
I'm really glad to see Geerling branching out of his initial niche coverage on everything-raspberry-pi(which I personally find a bit boring 95% of the time).
I think they should make it so the stuff is on an “elevator” that can be moved up and down. For safety.
[dead]
Nope. Just nope.
It blows my mind that HN post submitters don't do a simple spell check on their post titles.
That mistake ‘an’ is in the original blog title. I assume this was posted by the blog author
A simple spellcheck won’t detect it but grammar check might.
Edit: the reason is probably that the writer is saying “eleven hundred”. It sounds OK but looks strange in writing
The "an" is correct, if you read the number as "eleven hundred and fifteen".
Yeah, it's a fun edge case of writing numbers in numeral form... it could be wrong or could be right, depending on how you read the number!