>it's incredible the engineering that goes into getting a signal (in the case of this site, 10 signals) into an FM antenna system 300m above the earth!
this is what always amazed me. we used to drive by/through the local antenna farm in my area, and it always impressed me as a kid that these towers was where the radio/tv signals originated. driving by, you could see the bases of some of them were on a single point of an inverted pyramid which revealed the importance of the guide wires. these were the first structures that i understood to be designed to move. then learning stories of the power of the signal, the amount of electricity to create that power, the fact that the AM signals could change their wattage at night to be more powerful, that video was an AM signal with the audio being FM all multiplexed together.
then there was the time that a military jet clipped the guide wires forcing the 2 occupants to eject and causing the station on that tower to go off the air. or the much more gruesome time a local teenager climbed one of the smaller towers, thinking he could recreate an action movie scene, attempted to slide down the guide wires. the attempt was not successful as it sliced off his fingers causing him to free fall catching a lower wire which created 2 halves of him. in case anyone thinks of trying this, don't.
after all of that, wound up becoming a video engineer.
Man on internet tries to correct things outside his control, news at 11.
Today, a random person on the internet took it upon themselves to let the rest of the internet know that someone was doing something they did not like. Themselves, in all things being perfect, decided it was high time to correct the pedantic use of a word in a way that differs from their personal use. In other news, the internet yawned, and went about its day.
I'm just trying to share that the vast majority of people involved in towers would call them guy wires and not guide wires. Feel free to use whatever word you want to describe them, call them party lines or whippy clips or pedant wires or whatever you wish to call them. The people involved in actually running them will still call them guy wires in the end.
I mean, just do a quick Google image search. Search "guide wire" and then "guy wire". Which one returns images of towers?
I'm sorry you took offense to me sharing information with you. I definitely didn't intend to make you upset by letting you know those cables are almost universally called a different term.
Linguistically it’s easy to see why people would blur the line from cables that did guide something.
People use cables or ropes to guide long poles or similar structures into position and then tie them down for stability. Cranes of are of course easier, but not always available such as when replacing a sailing ships mast at sea.
Guy wires are often used similarly if for example wind loads are an issue during construction their tension need to be adjusted appropriately.
> Enough people say it wrong it eventually becomes right. There's nothing definitive about language except for usage...
This is a view that is common among English speakers. Among many German native speakers it is instead common to love to analyze words and tell why some word is wrong even if it is actually in common use sometimes for decades.
> could see the bases of some of them were on a single point of an inverted pyramid
I was under the impression these towers were AM because such a long wavelength is needed for AM radio stations that the whole tower is the antenna, with an insulator between the point of the inverter pyramid and the ground.
FM towers are not like this; the wavelength is much shorter and the tower is not part of the antenna. The antenna is a short element at the top insulated from the tower.
FM antennas are indeed placed as high up as possible on these towers, but the tower itself, being a guyed model and not freestanding, does come down to a "ball and socket" joint at the bottom, which allows the tower to move around slightly under the tremendous pressure of the guy wires yanking it down to earth.
Apparently there's a deep 25'x25' slab of concrete underneath that holds the socket the tower rests on.
Yeah that was later because the power stations caused too much interference.
The reach of medium wave increases at night and you get some local interference of far stations. They mitigated that by raising their local power causing even more interference. FCC stopped that :)
this is what always amazed me. we used to drive by/through the local antenna farm in my area, and it always impressed me as a kid that these towers was where the radio/tv signals originated. driving by, you could see the bases of some of them were on a single point of an inverted pyramid which revealed the importance of the guide wires. these were the first structures that i understood to be designed to move. then learning stories of the power of the signal, the amount of electricity to create that power, the fact that the AM signals could change their wattage at night to be more powerful, that video was an AM signal with the audio being FM all multiplexed together.
then there was the time that a military jet clipped the guide wires forcing the 2 occupants to eject and causing the station on that tower to go off the air. or the much more gruesome time a local teenager climbed one of the smaller towers, thinking he could recreate an action movie scene, attempted to slide down the guide wires. the attempt was not successful as it sliced off his fingers causing him to free fall catching a lower wire which created 2 halves of him. in case anyone thinks of trying this, don't.
after all of that, wound up becoming a video engineer.