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

Utqiaġvik, Alaska. Northernmost point in the United States.Three guyed towers, full TIA-222 tension, plumb and twist. Th...
09/22/2026

Utqiaġvik, Alaska. Northernmost point in the United States.

Three guyed towers, full TIA-222 tension, plumb and twist. The kind of job I’d have told you was out of reach a couple years ago.

We walked into peak whaling season. A bowhead landed, and the whole neighborhood out to cut and share it — that was right outside our Airbnb. Watching a community feed itself the way it has for a couple thousand years isn’t something you forget. Hoping we get offered a taste of muktuk before we head home.

Peak polar bear season too. Sightings in town since we got here. We don’t work a site without a local Iñupiaq guide with a r***e standing watch. That’s not for show — that’s the job.

Not smooth either. Freight sat in Anchorage for days with nobody telling us, and digging out ran about $8k out of pocket. Flew back down and hand-carried six bags of gear north myself.

Day 3.

Small company. Long way from home. Still swinging.

📍 Utqiaġvik, AK
🔧 VCTowers LLC — Milton, NH
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Utqiaġvik, Alaska. 325 miles north of the Arctic Circle.Three guyed towers, full TIA-222 tension, plumb and twist. North...
09/22/2026

Utqiaġvik, Alaska. 325 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Three guyed towers, full TIA-222 tension, plumb and twist. Northernmost tip of the United States. The kind of job I'd have told you was out of reach a couple years ago.

We walked into peak whaling season. A bowhead landed under floodlights, and the whole neighborhood out cutting and sharing it — that's the photo taken right outside our Airbnb. Watching a community feed itself the way it has for a couple thousand years isn't something you forget. Hoping we get offered a taste of muktuk before we head home.

The flip side: the bones go out to Point Barrow, so this is peak polar bear season too. Already been sightings in town since we got here. We don't work a site without a local Iñupiaq guide with a r***e standing watch. That's not for show — that's the job up here.

It hasn't been smooth. Our freight sat in Anchorage for days with nobody telling us it wasn't moving, and digging out of that ran about $8,000 out of pocket. Flew back down and hand-carried six bags of gear north myself to keep us on schedule.

Day 3.

This season has been nonstop — the calls, the referrals, people taking a chance on a small New Hampshire outfit. Grateful to be standing here at all, and to a community that's been nothing but good to us.

Small company. Long way from home. Still swinging.

VCTowers LLC — Milton, NH
603-507-1322 | vctowers.net

09/19/2026

A crank-up tower has a lot happening between the antenna and the ground. On this Tashjian TM-370HD Sky Needle, a motor-driven winch works through separate pull-up and pull-down cable systems to extend and retract the sections.

This clip stays close to the hardware: a pulley and its cable, followed by silicone service at a section guide. The job records cover the rest of the visit, including the winch, belts, rotator chain and an extension-and-retraction test.

09/18/2026

When you inspect an antenna, what do you check first? Here’s a close look at the insulators and mounting hardware.

09/18/2026

Eight insulators, one position at a time.
Replacing cracked insulators on a Mosley antenna with new A-1002 blocks, lockwashers and copper washers. The brass brush is part of the cleanup.

09/14/2026

A small setup like this changes the entire handoff for the groundman

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.
​

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

​

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.

​

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Portsmouth, NH

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