This tower is 95 feet tall.
The man at the top of this tower is the manager of my department.
Yesterday a team of us upgraded the wireless connection to aviation.
Aviation is a mile down the road from the computer center, and we use a standard home wireless router, connected to a 16db antenna mounted 95' in the air to get them their network link.
I've never seen this before with ordinary household wireless access points. (linksys, from cisco for $75 at fry's). And they were running this way for over two years.
So yesterday we upgraded the antenna to 25db, and the WAP to a professional grade with more diagnostics. (translation, their network is much much faster and many pilots,mechanics and admin staff are much happier)
But to do so, we had to run new lightning resistance, new grounding cables, drill holes in this wall stuff they call "cement board", route new network cabling. And basically get a crash course in electrical wiring for networking in a heavy lightning environment. I learned that copper grounding should never touch galvanized steel!
It was a full team event for an entire day, and it was some work.
The men on this tower are over 50, and they are trained telephone workers. Why is being over 50 significant? Well because one of their wives said, "can't they find anyone UNDER 50 to climb this tower?) He was up there for 4 hours!
Do not worry, yours truly would never have attempted climbing a tower like this.
But it was exciting being on the ground team and getting this job done.
See, I don't always sit in an office! In fact, I rarely get to simply sit in an office, I'm constantly doing odd and interesting things like this.
