”Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem” - Woody Allen

So I’m chatting over coffee with a couple of friends, all of us older gents who have been playing around with ham radio since back when our memories were all black and white. We were discussing a new problem, as if the hobby/service needed yet another thing to worry about. Our discussion was about towers and whether these would continue to exist into the future. The problem is pretty simple. We’ve all become too old to climb towers to perform repairs or even regular maintenance. This isn’t a brand new problem, but it has been evolving in such a way that it makes resolution more difficult than it once was.

A fellow has an 80-foot tower that has been in service for more than three decades. Anytime something needed to be done he puts on the appropriate safety gear and climbs the tower. But that’s a young man’s game. Once this fellow turned 65 his wife (and his equilibrium) wouldn’t let him climb the tower anymore, a problem easily resolved by getting a much younger fellow from the local radio club to help him out and perform the service for him. That worked, so long as there were willing and capable younger folks in the local club. But now looking around at the active club members on Field Day it was easy to see that everyone was more than 70 years old and there was none left to volunteer to help on the tower.

The expensive option is to hire a local tower climber to do the work. This required first finding such a professional, explaining what needed to be accomplished “up top” and then writing them a hefty check. As it turned out, payment was comparatively easy, finding someone was the real chore. Somewhere back in our long ago there were plenty of locals who installed television antennas and towers in the commercial realm and these could be called on in a pinch. But in an era where most people don’t even know “over the air” television exists, there’s so little demand for TV antenna installers that they have become as rare as hens teeth. Good luck finding someone.

Even more ridiculous, the biggest local tower problem isn’t finding someone to climb to the top and replace an antenna or feed line, the bigger challenge is finding someone to take the tower down. More than a few of the local hams with large towers have passed from this life leaving their spouse or family to figure out how to take it all down. One of my friends highlighted this problem when told the story of a mutual acquaintance who died and when his kids tried to sell his house several potential buyers said they would only make an offer once all the antenna equipment was first removed. Who you gonna call?