Cell Phone Mast or Tree?

Excellent!

And about time too. If we'd waited much longer then Mother Nature would have started adapting trees to look like cell phone towers as a defense against parasites, etc.

Ugh. Great sweeping forests of towers.

Comment to soon be overheard in a park near you:

"Honey, wasn't that red squirrel gray just a little while ago?"

Bloom with Microwave radiance

"Hug-A-Tree^® - excite your molecules, today ! Every Day !

At least your fake cell phone mast trees look like trees. The ones here in Malaysia look like a cell phone mast that someone attached some fake branches to.

It is actually pretty silly looking.

We have palm tree towers here in Az, USA.

They don't look much like palm trees, but you can tell that's what they're supposed to be.

Here in Israel, they simply tuck them behind giant Billboards, on the side of roads, on top of buildings, etc

Hi Kris,

And if you get bored with the landscape you could have one of these.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65Chy5kPQ-Y

I would love to have a setup like this with a remote control transmitter, to use on a cellphone tower.

ROFL ! It's only a matter of time before trees go around hugging people.

HUGG!!! "Thank you for not using me as an antenna!! It tickles so much when they transmit!!"

Although... In the ham radio world... A friend of mine DID use a tree for an antenna. He drove a nail into the tree, and connected his feedline to it. I gather that the sap is a good enough conductor that it will radiate rf. He then made several contacts with the setup to prove that it really does work.

Bill

Given the signal strength I'm getting, I'm starting to think my mobile phone operator is using a tree !

Nah just joking, but I think they need more ooopmh. When the teenagers all come out of school, the system more or less collapses (the phone goes to "emergency calls only"). I've noticed this on Friday nights. A couple of years back we had a quake, and the mobile phone cells got overloaded as people tries to contact each other. It seems worse since x-mas (more people with cell phones as presents ?). Am I right in thinking any given mast can only handle so many calls at once ? If so, does that imply they need more masts, or more <whatevers> on each mast ?

I do not know about UK, but here in the states, a cellular phone only uses RF between the user and the cell tower. Once your call reaches the cell tower, it gets dumped into POTS (the plain old telephone system). During an emergency, the police find out that the neat cell phones they have been issued are worthless, because they are competing with the general public, and our phone system can get overloaded too.

I may as well throw in my 2 cents for amateur radio. During an emergency, we man strategic points like hospitals, the emergency center, public works, red cross, and wherever else we are needed. Our communications are totally radio so we don't have to worry about overloaded phones. We really impressed Red Cross during one emergency a few years ago, because we could get digital traffic across the country to Red Cross headquarters in 15 minutes. We have a net much like Internet, only it is all radio.

It is 0130 here, so this kid is going to bed. See Y'all tomorrow.

Bill

Thanks for the info, Bill. Have a nice kip !

So that's what those strange wires were when I cut down that tree to make a bow
Del

That's the Power Supply Unit, to keep the grain in the wood facing the same direction. Technically it's called "Energized Isotropic System"

It might be worth going around and drilling holes in some. All sorts of creatures could find a home.......

I love this bit,"We put in the bird muck, the pollution, everything," she said.

Poor Pecker, woodpecker that is.

It at least looks better than the original ugly metal constructions, although kids now have to be careful which tree they climb.

No Variants? in the city; fake traffic lights, in the country side; windmills, in American native reservations; fake totem poles, near American bases; fake missile launch sites.

the possibilities are endless!

My design teacher used to say, "If you can't hide a mistake, make a feature of it". I don't think he had this in mind ;

(No, I can't figure out why everything in County Durham looks pissed either !)

With such a long shaft, one might as well think of going back to wired phones

There's a good example of one of these tree-disguised masts on the W side of the railway line a little north of Longmoor station on the Portsmouth-Woking railway line. It's so good that one has to look hard among the real trees to find it. It looks a lot like the indigenous firs around it, though there's a small electrical box at the base of it.

A reasonable way to hide a necessary evil, perhaps?

Doubtless Kris has a piccie of it.

This sad-looking object decorates the M4 between Reading & Newbury. It's been there for a few years, now.

I saw it yesterday, and it seems to be suffering from whatever the tree equivalent of mange is.