I’ve just secured a long term lease on a brilliant high site.
Unfortunately it’s regularly powdered with snow.
I’ve never built towers in snow before.
What do I need to know?
Do I just built the tower the same I normally would?
What do I do to keep the kit in the hut (that I also need to build) from freezing?
I will have a 220V 20A electricity supply available up there as part of the lease contract.
What equipment (antennas, enclosures etc) do I buy? I’d like the thing to carry on working when it snows. I also don’t want to go up there every five minutes because of equipment failures.
Pretty Much the same.
You do however need to consider ice loading when figuring the load aspects of the tower.
Signals 2.4, and 5.8…
Never had problem with signal degredation, with exception to thick, fast, and wet sleet.
Rain is much worse to deal with.
It is possible to get snow and ice build up on the antennas, it typically will fall of with sun and wind.
I have heard of people using ski wax, and nonstick cooking products to limit buildup, We have never had the need.
we have had to knock off ice from our mountain top sites from time to time. I dont think there is anything you can do to prevent it save some sort of miracle de-icing compound.
we have tons of mountaintop sites, but we only had to bang off one this year.
I you do have lots of wet snow or iceing problems, use a radom as it won’t stick as well. An other option would be to use heat tape on the back side of the antenna to melt off the ice. You should have no problems with cold temps.