Originally posted by: jagec
Pretty cool, actually. How much does a setup like that run?
Cost me a bit over $3K, all in all, when I calculate the cost of the tower, what I paid for concrete delivery, renting the mini-trackhoe to dig the footer holes and paying the father/son team who came and erected it (in a single day) once I had the ground work done. I originally built it to about 120 feet but added a last ten foot section a few moths later when spring leaves started to hint at (but didn't really reduce) the dB measurements. That added ten feet and fourth set of guy wires (12 wires total now). I've never seen my dB move even a single digit since that time nearly four years ago.
It's sturdy and, according to the guys who erected it, practically over-engineered. Not having done this before, my uncle and I were total sticklers about trying to keep to Rohn's guidelines. I was nervous about whether we had done the groundwork well enough and the guys who put it up just laughed and said they'd been on far higher towers with far more dubious support and never had an issue. There is very little if any sway even when you're on it in light wind. It's also rated to hold like 300 pounds with a half inch of ice on it or somesuch. Instead, it only has a few pounds on top and a grid dish that has low wind resistance. A half inch of ice around here is pretty rare. The key here is properly tensioned guy-wires and I have them checked periodically.
The biggest hassles are worries of lightning. There are suppressors and grounding where possible... but nothing will protect the gear from a direct strike if it were to happen. Yes, I've had gear get burned up a couple of times (seem to be non-direct static discharges that baked the ethernet interface, for instance, when I was using Cisco gear). I keep spare radios around and replacement is pretty trivial cost-wise if happens again. I run it as an ethernet bridge, so my view of the LAN to which its attached is more or less seamless... as if I were on campus. And, yes, the DS3 on the opposite end feels really nice in the house.
The radio is actually on the top of the tower. The biggest source of loss in the dB would be any cable I ran down the length of the tower from the antenna (not to mention the wire costing a fortune) . By keeping the antenna to radio cable at the length of the pigtail (couple of feet maxiumum), I'm keeping my signal strength as high as possible. The unit on the roof of a building on the opposite end is also only as long as the pigtail. Makes replacing the gear a bit of a pain in the ass since it's 130 feet off the ground... but it pays off in terms of quality of my signal. Might consider amps someday to bring the gear down to ground level - but it wasn't a good option when I first did this and I've just not reworked the design since it's been so stable.
Any other questions, feel free to ask. And, no, I don't have cable or DSL available to me... that's why I did this originally. I get bandwidth and control over my connection that I'd never get commercially... at least not for any kind of reasonable prices. Even if I could get comparble incoming bandwidth, most services would never give me outgoing speeds on this scale (i.e. no 384 kbit upstream limitations, for instance, like a lot of cable modems... it's multi-megabit both ways even if it is half duplex).
I'm definitely not claiming this is rocket science or some kind of grand achievement... it's not. WISPs do it all the time. I had just chipped in a link to my photos on one of the discussions about the 60 foot tower that cropped up all over the web yesterday and somebody cross-linked it here. Since I saw a ton of referrals in my web logs coming from anand, I poked my head in to see the discussion and decided to answer some questions... hope I can be helpful to anyone with curiosity.