Support

Best Practices

Most tower owners do not realize that roughly 90% of our technical support calls are directly related to installation. These failures could occur immediately upon power up or failures may not surface until months later but regardless it resulted directly from improper techniques that could have been prevented. This section will be dedicated to offering recommended techniques to improve the life of the system, help the installation crew’s quality and maybe even protect the tower owner’s valuable communication equipment that overall benefit everyone.

FAA Lighting Cable Routing Techniques

Planning your cable routing for your FAA lighting is often overlooked by tower owners because you can only see what is visible from the ground. Ever asked what’s on my tower? You may be surprised. Illustrated below is an example of how you should not route your cable down the structure.

A. Rigging the Tower
When rigging the tower for the cable it is important to plan your route. Wherever the rope is routed determines where the cable will be installed in most cases.
B. Routing the Cable
It would have been ideal to route the cable on this side of the antenna mounts.
C. Cable Damage
Placing a cable in this manner is what usually prompts future cable replacements. The cable will eventually be damaged due to abbrasions caused by movement from wind and vibration.
D. Securing the Cable
The cable should always be secured above and below all flanges and sharp objects allowing at least 1 inch of seperation to reduce tension on the flanges that could result in abrasion damage. NEC states that all vertical runs of cable should be secured with no more than 5 feet of separation between the fastening methods. This picture illustrates a considerable seperation over 5 feet.
What’s on your Tower?