Does the owner wait until it goes out or is it on a scheduled basis whether it needs it or not.
I'm sure that the tower owner has that bulb changed out on a regular schedule, rather than waiting for it to burn out. A burned out marker light on a tower requires notification to the FAA, and possible hefty fines if not fixed immediately.
Originally Posted by gfretwell
With them alternating between climbing and belaying off, the fall would just be painful, probably not deadly...
It looked like he was free-climbing the last part of the way. I'm sure the fall wouldn't be deadly. The sudden deceleration at the end of it might not be too healthy, though. Unfortunately, a fall from a height like that gives you plenty of time to think about it...
What the video does NOT show you is that, even on a calm day, the tip of that tower is swinging back and forth a good 5-ft. It's like changing a bulb atop the mast of a ship at sea.
If these guys are following rock climbing protocol they are always tied of to something and when you saw the lead guy tie off, the guy below was climbing. I still doubt the 20-30 foot fall before the line came tight would be pleasant and you would smack into the tower pretty hard.
Aah, memories of the old days! The top of our antenna was around 1070 feet. They used to kid me about jumping off of it. BASE jumping never tempted me. I figured that those guy wires or all the trees in the CYO camp below would do me in. BUT I wouldn't want to be up there without my rig on. With my luck, I would've snagged my pullout handle and gotten deployed off the tower. The bottom of our transmitter log had a line for nightly tower inspections. I think the local FAA number was there so we could call them if the beacon or side markers went out. They would put out a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) but I don't remember any next day replacements. I don't remember any scheduled lamp replacements but I think they might have relamped ones that weren't burnt out if they had to go past them anyway. Joe
Doing a little playing around on Google today and it looks like LED bulbs are taking over from Xenon bulbs for this application.
The LED manufactures are taking 10 years life at 24/7 usage.
I guess that means if you were a young installer you could only have to climb that tower 4 more times after the initial installation to replace the LED assembly before you retire.
All the transmitters would need to be shut down while people are climbing around the antennas at the top. It looks like a UHF TV station transmit antenna up atop that tower, and stations on UHF run something like 1/3 of a megawatt of RF. You don't want to be near that antenna if it's pumping out power like that. That means that the TV station has to go off the air, which means that they don't earn money during that time playing commercials. So you might as well change out all the lamps, and it's probably done early Sunday morning when most every viewer is sleeping in.
I've watched crews spend days painting operating broadcast antennas.
I've seen numerous instances of protesters climbing antennas of all manner of broadcasters, either to hang banners or to stage 'camp ins.'
Finally, our friends at Mythbusters tried the old 'cook you' myth with turkeys, and failed miserably. Besides broadcast towers, they tried radar masts.
I expect that the antenna in the video was operating at full power as they worked - and, contrary to the explanation in the video, I believe the spikey things you saw were there on account of broadcast static, rather than natural lightning.
