Parking Vehicles, etc around AM tower?

[Fran3]

Is it OK to use the area around an AM tower and on top of the ground radial system
as a parking lot for cars, trucks, SUV's, Motor Homes, Construction Equipment etc... and or material storage?

[kkiddkkidd]

NO. Not unless you are going to ground them too.

Many, many years ago, a client allowed a local wrecker service to store a few wrecks on their AM property for a few weeks and a few turned into dozens. It degraded their coverage more than I would ever have imagined at the time. I would be curious to know how it affected the antenna Z. Even tall vegetation will degrade the signal / stability in most instances.

You don't even want to know about the stations that thought it would be a good idea to build mini-warehouses on top of their ground systems with no connection to it. After spending a bunch of money grounding the frames and wainscotting of the warehouse buildings, the coverage returned to about normal.

Regards,

Is it OK to use the area around an AM tower and on top of the ground radial system
as a parking lot for cars, trucks, SUV's, Motor Homes, Construction Equipment etc... and or material storage?

[DaveSt]

I saw it done once. I recommended repairing the broken radials...

[Shane]

Put a parking lot over part of a radial ground system 20-odd years ago. But wasn’t around for completion of the project to know if it affected the DA. I do know that radials were put in the ground before backfill and the pavement was laid since I personally dug little channels for them and the channels were 8” deep. Which answers the question in the other thread.

Hope there’s a statute of limitations over this confession.

[Deep Thought]

Depends on the tower. If it is in the "danger zone" of 135°-170° it'll have a very high base impedance and will be very fussy about things near it so make sure you do it right. A 100x100 foot ground screen around the base will help stabilize it. Many towers have their ground radials embedded in asphalt for both land use and anti-theft reasons. If you are careful what you propose won't have any issues.

This tower is 142.8° tall at the operating frequency and has a self-storage facility built around it. The metal sheds and all the rest of the stuff stored there has no effect on the tower.

[Dale H. Cook]

I know of a two-tower (107 degrees tall) 5kw cloverleaf that had a strip mall built on their transmitter site decades ago, and they seem to maintain their monitor points with no difficulty (I spent a few years as backup CE there).



Tower 1 is inside the grey square near the center of the building, tower 2 is in the square notch in the NW corner of the parking lot.

[Nathaniel Steele]

I love that they named it the "Towers Shopping Center"....

I have nothing usefull to add to this topic ...sorry

[Dale H. Cook]

The CVS site in the upper right corner of the image is where the original AM/FM/TV studios were located. By the time I came to Roanoke more than thirty yeas ago the AM/FM had been sold and were in a store space on the north side (lower level) of the mall. The main and aux AM transmitters were at the back of that space near the truck delivery tunnel that runs the length of the lower level. When rent got too high the studios were moved, the phasing system got rebuilt in a more compact form, and the doghouse at the base of Tower 1 was replaced with a new transmitter building. Since then the TV moved to a new digital facility and the lot was developed for CVS.