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My impression is that these towers can be put up very quickly. This web page details the construction of a 980 foot tower in Texas in 11 days, using a "Skycrane" helicopter. I bet you could get analog and digital up and running in less time than it will take to file the next legal motion up in Alpine. |
Putting up the towers, once all the sections of the tower have been assembled, is the easy part of the project. It is akin to painting...the easy part is slapping the paint on whereas most of the work is in the preparation.
The rolled steel used for the vertical legs of a tower are not manufactured in this country. Once the tower is designed, that steel has to be ordered from Europe. In 1999, when I ordered a new 1094 foot tower for my station, it took five months to get that steel from France to the tower manufacturer in South Carolina. It took another four months for this steel to be processed and put together with other steel stock for what would eventually become the tower sections. All of that is sent to the site where the giant erector set has to be assembled into the actual vertical sections of the tower.
Of course, while all that is going on, the concrete for the base and the guy anchors can be installed at the site because that takes a good deal of time to accomplish too. It took two months to sink nine guy anchors and the tower base at my site.
The biggest problem will be coordinating the center of radiation (vertically and horizontally) in the market: The northeast corridor has a lot of short-spaced markets (Boston, Providence, Hartford/New Haven, NYC, Philadelphia) that require special attention in order to prevent interference between them. This is why the FCC originally restricted tower heights to 1000 feet for this area (Zone I in the FCC Rules & Regs) when the original Table of Allotments was defined in the early 1950's. Moving the NYC site to a 2000 foot tower 14 miles south of the WTC is going to upset the broadcasters in Philadelphia.
It's all going to be worked out. It will happen in a relatively quick time frame for the engineers and project managers that will be involved with the project but that will seem like a long time for the viewing public.
- Peter Dennant