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- Hacker News
- that article is incredibly hard to read. Luckily, an AI can summarise it in seconds.by gchokov
- This blog post has a really verbose format.
TLDR; White lights are used during the daytime, red lights at night (less annoying), towers under 200 feet don't need blinking lights.
by pizzalife - Slightly off topic: typically, lights of neighboring towers blink asynchronously. But sometimes they are synchronized. Very satisfying. Anyone knows how this works? My best guess is e.g. DCF77. Thoughts?by rollulus
- These beacons are also great for navigation. Aeronautical charts usually show the color/pattern of the light. You can use those as points to triangulate your position.by barbazoo
- I love the narrative storytelling here, but the takeaways seem somewhat obvious.
Lights on towers mean stuff, especially to airplanes.
Lights are required for tall towers, and get this, towers next to airports.
You can guess how tall a tower is by looking at the lights.
by alex_young - FAA details the marking and lighting requirements here: https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/advisory_circulars/...by scblock
- > Joe: [...] So whenever there's a project on the tower, it's not unusual to see the guys in some kind of a, what do they call those?
> Jeff: A full ghillie suit? Or I don't know what they're called.
If you see someone up in a tall tower wearing a ghillie suit [0]... that sounds like time to call emergency services while avoiding their line-of-sight. :p
(Perhaps they meant "Hazmat" [1])
by Terr_ - I worked at a television station years back that was designed in such a way that the lights going up the tower were powered by the separate phases of three phase AC with the one at the top powered from all three combined. This was pretty normal but what the engineer had done was rotate them at every level so that if a phase was dropped you could count the lights and quickly see from a distance that the power wasn't right. 4 lights was good, 3 meant you dropped a phase, and so on. I thought it was a pretty clever way of keeping light on all sides of the tower while being able to tell from a distance that a phase was out.by skinwill