Tower

The Tower Project

Deconstructing Tower
by Tray Murphy, N4PAT

(Kids, don't try this at home!)

Hams just love a project, and even more, they love free stuff. So when Jay Silvio, N9WMU, passed on to me the contact for a tower that needed to be removed, I jumped on it. It seems that a local pharmacy had no further need of its 60' Rohn 25G tower and a commercial 4-bay VHF antenna, so I offered to remove it. The owner was glad to see it go because vandals would use it to reach the roof of the shopping center and damage AC units and the roof.

The team assembled Saturday morning March 26 at 6:45AM to start the "decontruction". Mike Baker, N4LSP, was elected crew chief since he had the greatest amount of small tower experience. David Calder, KI4GHZ, was the climber, and Phil Davis, KD4BMQ and Steven Marsh (not licensed) were my ground crew. David and Steven are both engineering students at Virginia Tech and are Eagle Scouts from my Boy Scout troop. Neither had ever done any tower work, but both are smart enough to figure out mechanical problems, so I figured, rightly, that they would be assets. Plus, David weighs a lot less than Mike or me and would be more suitable to be on top of the rickety tower while it was being disassembled.

Mike and I got there first and discovered the tower's bottom section had been hit, probably by a backing truck, and was about 6" out of plumb. A come-along fixed that. When David arrived, Mike started his tower climbing lessons. Safety was #1. We wanted everybody in one piece when we finished. Phil, Steven and I assembled equipment, and cleared the "anti-climbing" barriers off the tower (2 2x12's and some barbed wire). Finally, David started up. The first job was to put temporary guys on the tower - it was so loose that shaking the bottom set up a standing wave of motion in the entire thing! Two air conditioners' frames and a tree provided guy anchors.

David got the gin pole in place and we lowered the 14-foot-long commercial grade antenna (4-element VHF, for 150-160MHz, Wanna buy it?). The rest of the tower was fairly easy. Section by section, David moved the gin pole down, removed the bolts and Steven and I pulled upward to separate the sections, then lowered them as Phil directed the tag line to keep the section away from the bulding and the one "aerial hazard" - a comcast cable line coming in to the restaurant that the tower was behind. We were fortunate that the original installation crew had not crimped any of the legs, or overtightened bolts to the point they could not be easily removed.

We loaded the sections in Phil's trailer as they came down. The temp guys were removed when we got below them, and the last 2 sections were lowered by hand after the bolts were pulled from the "house bracket" holding the tower to the building (three rusty u-bolts were, in fact, its only support).

Cleanup took only a short time, and we had unloaded it at my house by 11:30AM. The tower is now resting in my yard, waiting for a tower-raisin' party, hopefully in June.

My sincerest thanks to Jay, Mike, David, Phil and Steven for their help! The tower came down without a hitch and will soon be in amateur radio use. The first antennas will be a dual band (2M/70cm) base antenna and one for an APRS digipeater.

The tower: