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- Hacker News
- Changing a radio tower light bulb is not for the weak of heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b9LahaBJIkby spc476
- It's not just radio towers. I've seen aircraft warning lights on tall buildings, particularly those near airports.
see https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-E...
by loph - mentioned in the articleby emmelaich
- Related: Some wind turbines apparently only turn on their position lights when there's any aviation traffic nearby (as detected by either local transponder interrogators (possibly ADS-B receivers?) or radar)!by lxgr
- Radar, called Aircraft Detection Lighting Systems (ADLS). The requirements are summarized in the FAA Advisory Circular covering aviation marking and lighting.by scblock
- In the past year or two they have also added a quick periodic flash of white light for when visibility is low; like a camera flash that happens every few seconds. I think it was added this spring but don't quite remember.by ofalkaed
- 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 - It's a transcript of the video at the top.
- 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
- It's probably just a side effect of them being powered on at the same time or not?by winrid
- One option - Maybe the blinking time is set to a INDEPENDENT? accurate time piece - ie Blink on the change of a secondby asdefghyk
- When it's on purpose it's typically done through GPS driven clocks. This is how wind farms manage it, where all towers are required to blink together.by scblock
- Driving through a massive wind farm at night is a trip since they all blink in unison. Having them all independently would look interesting but could rapidly descend into madness:by rts_cts
- I’ve driven through wind farms where the blinking tower lights are synchronized. Highly distracting.by SoftTalker
- My observation is not that they are sometimes synchronised, but some subset of the towers are synchronised (this was my observation in Melbourne AU). Upon asking reddit, it appears that it is the FAA-preferred option that all lights are synchronised: https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...by askvictor
- I believe it's usually GPS/GNS (they all receive the time via GPS independently, and flash at predetermined times). The FAA requires synchronization for many classes of obstruction because it makes it clear that you're looking at obstruction lights rather than e.g. brake lights or traffic lights on the ground.
- 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
- IIRC, light houses are marked on charts similarly. The lights have different patterns, maybe color too?? Maybe not on aeronautical charts though.by dylan604
- You have brought back to me memories from 30+ years ago, playing Microsoft flight simulator, trying to triangulate my position using VOR beacons as quickly as possible before my aircraft had moved so far on that I was no longer anywhere near my triangulated position, hah!by gorgoiler
- 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 - "My license to operate the tower is contingent upon my ability to appropriately light it."by themafia
- FAA details the marking and lighting requirements here: https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/advisory_circulars/...by scblock
- One interesting fact I learned in a different discussion is that when LED lights are used for obstruction lighting, the FAA has standards that require infrared emitters to make them visible to night vision goggles, since unlike incandescent bulbs, some LED's can be invisible to NVG's.
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/airports/engineering...
by Johnny555 - > 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 can’t imagine why they’d need a hazmat suit either. It’s probably just protection from the cold.by mr_toad
- > If you see someone up in a tall tower wearing a ghillie suit
My first thought would be “that might be the dumbest sniper I have ever seen”…while I was taking cover, because even if they are dumb, they might still be a capable marksman.
by kcplate - Haha, yes. For some reason, ghillie suit was the only thing I could think of at the time. I think they wear basic tyvek suits while doing paint work, not sure if they need full hazmat (maybe if the tower has lead paint?).by geerlingguy
- 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
- Fascinatingby butlike