VCTowers

VCTowers Tower. Antenna. Communications Infrastructure. Field work, inspections, and close-out documentation. New England and beyond.

09/06/2026

I found a split in one of the legs after the tower was already on the ground.

Half the comments on the last video asked why I climbed it. Fair. Here’s what I didn’t put in that caption. We checked the base where the steel meets the concrete. Checked every guy anchor — two weren’t safe, so we ran temporary guys before anyone left the ground. Tied off above every cut. Did it all the way we always do it. The split was still there. Small enough to miss from the base, from the climb, and from the cut. I was tied off to that tower and never saw it.

Water gets into the legs, no drain holes, and thirty winters will split the steel from the inside. The rust you can see from the driveway isn’t what hurts you. It’s what’s inside the leg where nobody looks.

Why not a crane? House fifteen feet away, so you don’t pull it over. A crane on a sixty-foot tower doubles the bill and the customer walks. Tower stays up another decade getting worse. So you do the checks and you climb.

It held. That’s the only reason you’re reading this.
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09/06/2026

In theory that pin is what stops it from spinning. In the shape
it’s in, it isn’t stopping much

Most of the towers we work on were not put up by tower crews. They were put up by ham operators, and what we find up there is subpar hardware, substandard bolts and a lot of rust just to save a couple bucks. So it’s brake clean to clear the oxidation, Kroil into the joint, and you let it soak while the rigging goes up. You don’t get to force it, because a seized rotator at the top of a mast doesn’t come apart on your schedule.

09/03/2026

You’ve never heard a tower do this. Sound on.

Crank-up tower. Steel cable loading onto the hand winch while three sections of lattice slide past each other. Every crank-up makes a noise. This one makes a crazy noise

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09/01/2026

Nobody would ever know if you skipped this step. That’s the whole reason you shouldn’t

Turnbuckle safety cables on a fresh tower install. The cable runs through the body and both eyes, gets crimped, and now the turnbuckle physically can’t rotate. It’s not carrying load. It’s just locking in the tension we set today so it’s still there in twenty years.

A turnbuckle holds your guy wire with threads. That’s the entire mechanism. Wind, vibration, freeze and thaw — threads back off over time and it happens slow enough that nobody notices until a guy wire is visibly slack.

Five minutes per anchor on a brand new tower where nobody is ever climbing up to verify it.

​

Even with a panel like this, lightning will still take you to the cleanersWe built this box to protect a site from light...
09/01/2026

Even with a panel like this, lightning will still take you to the cleaners

We built this box to protect a site from lightning and weather. Inside there's a copper bar that everything connects to. Every cable coming in from outside gets its own surge protector before it goes any further. Then one heavy wire runs from that copper bar straight into the ground.

The idea is simple. Lightning wants to reach the ground. If you give it an easy path, it takes the easy path instead of going through your gear.

But it's not a guarantee. Here's the part most people don't know. Lightning doesn't have to hit your building to hurt you. If it hits nearby, it can push voltage into everything around it. And if all your cables and grounds aren't tied together at the exact same point, that voltage moves through your equipment looking for balance. That's how a site that looks properly grounded still ends up with fried hardware.

One ground point. Everything bonded to it. That's the whole game
​

08/29/2026

A real estate company reached out to us to remove this 60’ Rohn 25g tower close to home. This structure was left to rot.

The overall structure was in very poor shape, the mast was EMT pipe, the tower was a rust bucket, and the homeowner was trying to find someone to remove it so they could sell their house.

There were no drainage provisions when installed over a couple decades ago, so when we cut it at the base - there was so much water pouring out of 2 of the three legs. This makes home installed tower structures even more dangerous, especially to a homeowner who has no idea about the structure, if those legs froze and split in the middle of the winter, this could have fallen right onto their house and caused a much bigger problem then they ever imagined.

We got in an out of there in a half day and solved their problem

08/28/2026

You never know what's waiting at the top of a ham-built tower. This time it was a chrome rotator engraved RD-1800-H by C.A.T.S., cursive script, no other markings I could find. I've never had my hands on one like it. If it's a custom build, somewhere out there is the guy who machined it.
​

08/27/2026

Lightning never touches your radios. Your coax handles that part.

When a tower takes a hit, the surge doesn't stay on the steel. It couples onto the shield of every cable on that structure and rides it down — through the entry port, into the building, into whatever's on the other end of the connector. Ground kits are how you break that path. Each one bonds the coax shield to the tower ground system so the energy has an exit to earth before it reaches your equipment.

This is what we hung on this 1/2" run: the CommScope SureGround kit, SG12-12B2U. Fits LDF4-50, FSJ4-50, and HL4RP-50 Heliax.
Tested to 100,000 amps peak surge current (MIL-STD-1757)
6-gauge copper bonding conductor, tinned copper strap, stainless locking bail
One-piece snap-and-lock design — installs clean in tight bundles, only 1-1/2" of jacket comes off
Universal lug fits one-hole or two-hole ground bar points
Two-part butyl + PVC weatherproofing, IP68 immersion rated, -40°F to +185°F
Hardware is half the job.

Placement and sealing are the other half. R56 and NFPA 780 land in the same place: one kit at the top of the vertical run, one at the bottom, one before building entry — long runs get more. And the weatherproofing isn't cosmetic. A kit that takes on water corrodes at the bond, and a corroded bond is an open circuit wearing a copper strap. It looks fine from the ground right up until the storm that proves it wasn't.

08/27/2026

When a client tells us they found the tower, or that they're supplying the sections we're going to put up, those sections get inspected before anything else happens. We don't want to make promises come install day and then find a split leg or some cracked panel points with everybody already standing there.

So we walk the whole pile. Hands on the legs, hands on the panel points, one section at a time. This one looks great other than one spot. There's about 90 feet laying in the grass here and we'll probably only end up using six or seven of these, so we pick out the best ones and do some further investigation on the rest.

He's going to recoat these and get them galvanized as well, and we told him he should definitely do that. Then we'll be ready to rock and roll and get him up on the air.
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