Chris and Keri’s Blog

So back last summer shortly after we moved into our new place out in the boonies, I built a radio tower so I could get wireless internet service. That adventure is fully detailed here. Even with a 70 foot tower, I was only able to connect to the tower in the closest town which uses an older technology and has lots of users, so the speeds were quite slow. They got as slow as 100kbps during peak usage hours. Better than nothing,  but quite slow even just for casual web surfing.

I had been pondering ever since how to increase the height of the tower. I reasoned if I could get the antenna at least 20 feet over the tops of the trees I should be able to get a signal from Hemlock, about 7 miles away which has higher speed towers from two different companies. In March I finally devised a plan that would bring the tower up to about 100 feet tall.

The tower I have is a Rohn BX tower which uses tower sections that decrease in width as the tower gets taller. I had 4 extra sections on hand, but due to this design I couldn’t just add them to the tower. What I decided to do was to cut the tapered end off the extra sections and use them as a straight extension to the tower. I drilled new bolt holes in the ends of these “extension” sections and bolted them in just like the original sections. It did require a bit of persuading with a heavy maul to get them seated together but it worked pretty well.

After I got the tower re-assembled I tried to crank it up using the winch system I had designed previously. I had over-designed the winch system and I re-calculated the loads to make sure the cable and winch would still be strong enough. Unfortunately I did not give any consideration to the strength of the anchor bolts in the tower foundation and they bent as I tried to winch the taller tower.

This was a substantial setback and I quit working on it for the day while I decided how to fix it. The solution I came up with was to change the winch system. Previously the cable that lifted the tower ran through a pulley that was about 14 feet off the ground. To get a better angle on the cable I needed to lift this up higher. The only solution was to run a cable between two of the large pine trees and hang the pulley from that.

After installing the new winch cable and using a 4-ton come along to bend the anchor bolts back into position, I successfully lifted the new tower. I now could get an antenna about 105 feet above the ground, which would be enough to get a clear line of sight to Hemlock.

As I mentioned earlier there are two companies with towers in Hemlock. Skyweb, my current provider who I was pretty unsatisfied with and SpeedNet which is a much larger company. I played around with Google Earth to see what my paths to the towers would be. They ended up being about the same distance, but the SpeedNet tower was taller and used 3 sectorized access points rather than one omnidirectional so I figured I’d be able to get better service from SpeedNet. Unfortunately despite many phone calls I was unable to convince them to come out and install their radio because a computer simulation they use showed that I was slightly too far away. I then contacted SkyWeb and was able to get in touch with a network engineer who worked with me to get me a new radio for the faster Hemlock tower that I could install myself.

So yesterday after a couple weeks of waiting for the new radio I finally got it and installed it on the tower yesterday. Aiming it was a little tricky as the signal strength lights were 100 feet up in the air and very difficult to see, even with binoculars, but I was able to get a good stable signal and then ran inside to run a speed test.

The speeds were excellent compared to what I had been seeing. I’m using a 3mbit radio and seeing right about 2mbit up and down consistently, even during peak hours. If I decide I need more the radio is upgradable to 6mbit or 20mbit.