back to Antenna Parties

2025.10.05 Lafayette Rd Antenna:


Nick (KD0WVN) is helping renovate a house with a tower, and the new owners want it gone. It's a pretty tall
tower and they can either pay someone to tear it down and scrap it, or better if they can find someone to come
take it down and have it for free. (so no demo and removal cost for them)

We stopped out to get some pictures and a little video. At first I was skeptical of his height estimate (100ft)
but after seeing it in person it does appear to be around 9.5 sections tall. It's attached to the house's second
story and the bottom is a section half buried in concrete, so the foundation looks solid, and I don't see any
rust either. Ignoring the section in the concrete and the bent section, there's probably 6-7 mid and one top
that could be salvaged.

The problem is in the guying. It's got two lower guys on the house corners, which only provide maybe at 45
degree angle. There's a guy post some distance back from the house where the 3rd wire attached but has since
broken. The tower has one more set of guys near the top, one of which goes to the post and one to a corner
of the house, but the other house guy is also broken.

The tower bends noticeably away from the house after the first guys, and the one wire to the post is under a lot
of tension. I suspect it was over-tightened to compensate for excessive movement due to the loss of the upper
house guy wire.

All that's on the tower right now is a mid-size TV antenna, and probably a small rotor. Cables lead down but
are cut off at roof level. There's also a small empty bracket about halfway up. The top tower piece is a top
section with neck.

I suspect only one section is slightly bent, though that would render that section unusable. To safely take
apart this tower would require loosening the pole guy wire and adding temporary guy ropes at the middle and
top. Ideally this would straighten out the tower a bit to make climbing and section dropping safer. Given the
height of the tower, trying to simply drop it to scrap it looks risky There's a fence in the back that might
be in range of the antenna, and a garage/shed building off to one side that is definitely in range if the tower
swings too far to the side on the way down.

DSCN6115	DSCN6117	DSCN6119	DSCN6120	DSCN6121	DSCN6122
DSCN6123	DSCN6125	DSCN6127	DSCN6128	IMG_4586	IMG_4588

DSCN6130.MOV (63 MB)

highest resolution images
last updated 10/05/2025 at 16:26:00 by make_www_index.command version 2025.06.28.A