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Fixed Wireless Equipment

If You're Building a Small Tower

Veterans say it's better to go with a prefab tower than to try to design your own, and that it's obvious where to go to get one.

[August 11, 2008]

On the ISP-Wireless list in June, EB asked:

I'm looking for drawings for a 30 foot lattice frame tower. Have a guy that can manufacture one for me but he needs some (technical) drawings to go by.

[DM warned] "Tread carefully—you would have all the liability if that thing fell down. You would be better off asking an engineer to approve a design."

[EB replied] "That's why I am looking for a drawing of an approved design."

[DM suggested] "For 30 feet, you can buy off-the-shelf for fairly little. If it is not going on a building, you could simply buy a telephone pole."

[CC elaborated] "For 30 feet, you could certainly buy a pre-engineered tower for much less than what a good fabricator could put one together for. The man hours alone would be more than an off-the-shelf tower.

For around $600 in hardware, you could put up 3 sections of Rohn 45, unguyed, and have a pretty solid tower.

If you had 20 feet around the tower for guy wires, you could put up 3 sections of Rohn 25 for right around $300.

Shoot, at only 30 feet, you'd be better off finding an old telephone pole to have dropped in the ground.

We got free 50 foot poles (35 to 40 feet after installation) from a power company who was replacing poles along a county road. The crew dropped them in for us for $100 per pole. There are a lot of ways to do this better than trying to make something from scratch."

—End