No More Antenna Problems

I thought I would post this just in case other people have had similar problems or maybe give someone an idea.

First off let me explain why I'm using an antenna. Where we live we can't get cable and satellite tv is just ridiculously expense so we opt to use an antenna for basic over the air broadcasts. Since that and netflix are our only entertainment we do try to keep it up and working.

Ok all about why and how we built the tower. Here in the Arizona desert we get lots of high wind storms. Most of the time it's ok but, at least once a year we get a nasty one with extremely high winds that always seems to damage something. In my case the antenna mast was damaged every year and twice one year. So in the first 3 years of owning our house the antenna mast was damaged 4 times. Well let me tell you that is a real pain in the butt to have to keep fixing. So when the mast was damaged a 5th time I said enough was enough and starting looking into how to never have this problem again. The answer I came up with was a nice sturdy radio tower. The way the radio towers are built the are very sturdy and hold up to the wind well.

First thing I did was to start looking for used towers but, the cheap ones were $75-$100 dollars US per 10 foot section. Well that wasn't going to work for me. So back to the drawing board. So I looked at the antenna mast and found that it was a single thin walled pipe. in doing some comparisons I found that I could get a slightly larger diameter and thicker walled galvanized pipe in 10 foot 6 inch section from my local Home Depot. I also found 20 foot long 1/2 thick rebar cheap there are well. So I suddenly had the idea to build my own radio tower. I did some quick math and figured I would need 10 pipes and 5 pieces of rebar.

I cut the rebar into 1 foot segments then measured out and marked the locations were all of the rebar went. I then used 3 pipes to make 1 10 foot section. I repeated the 2 more time to make 3 sections total.

On the top section I added a mast to be able to mount  the antenna on. I made sure that the mast was solid and well supported to avoid as much vibration as possible.

Once all three sections were completed we lined them up and slipped the ends of one into the ends of the other pipe sections. Each pipe had a 6 inch section that was pressed down to fit inside the other end of the pipe. This worked out really well. We put them together, leveled them out and welded them. I decided the I didn't want them to come apart in order to give the tower a little more rigidity.

Once all of the sections were leveled and welded we we were ready to put the tower up. At this point I had to get 4 more pipes to make the braces I used to mount and stabilize the tower to the house. I also bought 8 bags of concrete for the base foundation.

We dug the foundation hole 3 feet deep and 3 feet in diameter. My boys and a friend all helped to pick up and move the tower and place the end into the foundation hole.
The 5 of us then started to walk the tower up. This was a bit of a challenge but, we got it standing. Once the tower was up we gad to put the braces in place. I had to have the boys move the welder onto the roof so that I could weld the braces on to the tower after mounting them to the house.

We then took some broken pieces of concrete and placed them in the hole and ran some rebar in the hole to add an extra anchor. We then poured in the concrete and added some more broken concrete. Then troweled the top so the center was raised to expel any water. We also had the boys put their hand prints and the year in.

After letting the concrete set I installed the antenna on top and then ran conduit along one of the braces for electrical wiring and mounted a light about 20 feet up.

In total the tip of the tower now sits at 32 feet. This allowed me to now mount the antenna at about 31 feet. Which was about 16 feet higher than the old mast. This new height has really improved our reception and the amount of channels that we receive.

You can see one of my sons in the second picture having climbed almost to the top of the tower. It is very stable and hardly shakes or moves. About 2 months after the tower went up we had a storm with gust pushing 125 miles per hour and the tower held like a champ. However the winds snapped my flagpole in the front yard like it was a twig. Since the installation of the tower it has held without issue with every sand storm, wind storm and monsoon.

The one thing that I should note is that I did ground the tower. I put in an 8 foot grounding stake several feet away and ran 4 heavy 6 gauge wires from the tower to the grounding stake. I also ran a separate ground from the coaxial cable connector down to the grounding stake as well just as an extra precaution.

All in all I spent about $100 US to build the tower. If you ask me it was money well spent given that I don't have to fix it anymore, we get better reception and more channels. The lights works well enough to light up the east side of our property. I have also thought about the possibility of mounting wind mills on a tower like this. We'll just have to see what other people come up with.