Basejumper.com - archive

Have a close to home 'A' that requires jumping onto so as not to short it out and get zapped. It has a huge rubber insulator at it's base.

Would walking up a slightly angled dry wooden plank to a point at which I/we could start climbing provide sufficient insulation to negate getting zapped?

Cheers,
751

You've got to be kidding...this has to be a troll -

Oh wait a minute,you're Australian......yes the plank should be fine.

Cheers, Spence

 
Get On, Get Up, Get Off . . .

The 10-foot wooden plank used on our local 700-footer stayed on the roof of a small one-story maintenance shed next to the tower. It sat up there for years. The plank is shoved out to within a few feet of the tower and you’d only get as close as you had other jumpers to counterbalance the plank. It’s always fun when a new jumper is on the load, and an unseen last drag on a cigarette (or whatever) produces a nice cloud of smoke as you landed on the tower.

With this system the last person, usually the most fit, has to jump across without the plank.

This AM tower is (still is) very hot and pumping out mega-watts of electro magnetic radiation. The deal here is get on, get up, get off. Most BASE jumps have factors to be considered outside the actual jump and doing AM towers means making an informed decision about dealing with the EMR aspects. I will say, most unscientifically, the jumps we made began there almost twenty years ago and among that group there isn’t an out of range cancer cluster.

The science otherwise, on EMR, is split. Some research (most sponsored by companies that own power lines) show no long term damage from EMR. Other studies (done by Universities and the like) conclude there is molecular damage right down to the gene level. Yikes . . .

Nick
BASE 194

EM theory says that if you're dead centre of the antenna then the radiation is zero. The only problem is that only 1 nut can be dead centre at a time. Unless you're well practiced in walnut stacking theory...

Good luck. Give my best wishes to your grandchildren, in fact give them a big kiss on each head from me.

Having been shocked on an AM antenna before, hopefully I can help you (it's a long story...).

You should be fine with the plank. Arcing can occur at shorter distances, so be sure you are always cleanly and sufficiently separated from the ground as you first touch the tower.

Or you can do as I have done in the past. I convinced my jumping buddy to try to jump onto the tower and if he got shocked, I would beat his arms off the tower using an old wooden rake found nearby. It worked. He didn't get shocked. Damn, that would've been fun to whack the shit out of his arms as he got juiced, since he's the one who got my ass shocked on the other tower mentioned in the first paragraph.

Just keep an eye out for the isolators that are painted to match the tower....sometimes, you can't see that it's an AM tower. Zap!!!!

Cya.

Can an antenna be FM and AM at the sametime?

\

Every tower I've ever seen in the U.S. has been one or the other. But I don't think the technical hurdles to creating a "both" AM/FM tower would be insurmountable.

So, yes. It may be possible. I've never seen or heard of it, though.