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Comment by philg_jr | Hacker News Reader

Something that completely fascinates me are cell towers/equipment. They are everywhere, yet I know almost nothing about them and rarely get to see them up close. Even less often (pretty much never) meet anyone who work on the equipment. I imagine each base station is basically a mini datacenter. I was at Mammoth Mountain recently for the first time and got to see the cell towers at the top of one of the lifts up close and got some good pictures.

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I’ll try to write up a blog post on it. The newer stuff I’m out of touch with, but I’ve worked on a good chunk of the gear you commonly see still.

The one thing I miss about working for a major national telco was access to the internal newsgroups where you'd get deep discussions triggered by someone's random question on things.

The FCC's Antenna Structure Registration website [1] is a good place to start.

Crown Castle [2] owns a fair amount of cell towers across the US. If it's a freestanding tower, they often also own the land where it is situated on.

[1] http://wireless.fcc.gov/antenna/index.htm?job=home

[2] http://www.crowncastle.com/

I would absolutely love a big writeup on how they're set up and what the components are, as well as all the real-estate stuff that certainly surrounds them. I'm also noticing a lot of new towers that look like big cylinders on a pole, sort of like a TACAN so I often wonder what's up with that.

I do know that the traditional ones are triangle shaped such that they each form the intersection of a hexagon tessellation (hence the cell in cellphone) such that you have three towers pointed into every hexagonal cell.

The cell companies are actually moving away from the large towers as 5g service is deployed in favor of microcells.

http://www.steelintheair.com/Blog/2017/04/top-10-things-the-...

They can be built into decorative lighting poles such that you would really have to pay attention to notice them.

How does that work in rural areas? Microcells all the way down the highway at regular intervals?

Microcells are good for carrying lots of traffic from lots of mobile stations. In rural areas, coverage at the lowest cost per square mile is more important. Also, farmers aren't always near the highway, so microcells on the highway would not work well for them.

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