"Leon Fisk" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:40:20 -0700, Bruce L. Bergman
wrote:

snip
Probably didn't do the waveguide and diplexer and transmitters and
receivers any favors either...

That's the time you just drop a dumpster at the door of the repeater
shack and shovel it all out to start fresh. Certain bits may have
survived unscathed, but it'll take way too long to find them and
certify that each and every function still works... Let the factory
service depot do that.

That was my old line of work, lightning damage was hard to
guess. Looking at the structure though, a water tower, I
wouldn't be surprised if the antenna was the worst of it.
They (antenna) are normally a DC connection to ground. That
absorbs a bunch of energy in itself. Fiberglass antennas
perform well RF wise but don't take lightning hits well.

Different tower sites had different tendencies. Some rarely
received lightning damage even though you knew they were hit
regularly. Others seemed to get beat-up every time a dark
cloud floated by. If the site was hardened, built to R56
standards damage was always pretty limited. I doubt if there
are too many cell sites anymore that aren't built to that
spec in lightning prone areas (shrug).

--
Leon Fisk
Grand Rapids MI/Zone 5b
Remove no.spam for email


dang. i was hoping to go rooting through their dumpster, see if i could get
some copper scrap.

a couple weeks ago we had a major local telephone outage here, surprisingly
lasted several hours, that's unusual. when copper was (WAY) up there was a
band of bandits who were cutting down couple-hundred-feet sections of
telephone cables in towns around here. happened at least 3 times, maybe 4,
can't remember. this incident that happened to my town was when the price
of scrap copper was down. they cut a couple hundred feet of, what the
telephone guy called (i went there and was being nosy, talking to the
telephone repair lineman guy) "400 and 300 pair" cables, the ones i saw
lying next to the road were cut into like 20, 30 foot lengths, maybe about
an inch and a half/two inches in diameter. this time they ALMOST got
caught, they left the cable and one of their ladders. the cut sections of
cable laid there next to the road for a few DAYS, i was sorely tempted to
load it into my truck but i figured they must've had some infrared spotting
cameras pointed at it or something.

b.w.