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Re: [TowerTalk] Antenna & Tower Wind Load Ratings

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Antenna & Tower Wind Load Ratings
From: Kurt Andress <andresskurt@gmail.com>
Reply-to: Kurt Andress <kurt@k7nv.com>
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2017 23:40:50 -0700
List-post: <mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>

On 6/16/2017 11:34 PM, Kurt Andress wrote:
Hi Jim,
Thank you for you contributions to the discussion!
How you may decide to solve some problems is not necessarily how I would chose to solve them....but that is probably not critically important.
We are pre-assembling three 16 element tribanders and two full size 
40's for a very large new rotating tower system for a client, with 
several other antennas on it. I have determined what needs to be done 
to the antennas to maintain wind torque & gravitational balance on all 
the antennas, as they can actually be installed on the tower system, 
and we have made the counterweights and compensators to do that. No 
antenna builder out there is capable of doing that!
We just do it for our clients, when they decide they want things done 
right....
Be mindful that even when antennas are properly torque balanced the 
best they can be.....there are certain sites that produce unbalanced 
wind loads on them due to the near field terrain!!!!
Rating rotators for the incorrect or correct antenna areas is totally 
useless! Rotators only care about the torque developed by the antenna 
system they need to control!
Jim, when you have developed the software to perform non-linear 
analyses of antenna members continually inclined to different attack 
angles in the increasing wind speeds, please let us know! Most of my 
pro colleagues would like to have that capability, there is no 
non-linear platform that can do it today....
I know how I approach that, it takes many tons of time to even 
approximate it, but it can be done if one is dedicated enough to spend 
the time to approximate it! If you have finite element software and 
are a capable practitioner with it, you can do this, it just takes 
more time than following 222-G standards......
On reflectors there are always people that say things, then there are 
people that appear to know things, then there are people that actually 
do the things they know......
Nothing I have ever designed from scratch has ever failed, I've had 
plenty of failures trying to make things delivered/built by others 
survive!
The linear analyses of EIA/TIA 222G do a pretty good job according to 
the hordes of professional engineers that developed it, for us to use 
as a guide to do what we do! I'm sure you have never ever even seen 
it! But, you might learn something if you did........but, since this 
is certified to be Amateur Experimental Radio, we all have free 
license to just be Amateurs and experiment with what we think we know ;-)
How the individual parts of antennas are designed and built is up to 
the designer that is responsible for that, nothing I have designed 
from scratch for any clients have ever failed, because I have fully 
vetted them for the loads the were expected to encounter, for the 
EIA-222-G rating I certified them for. I have no knowledge of what 
others have done....
There is one simple principle, that my first year engineering 
professor drilled into our minds.....things only fail when they are 
inadequate, there is always a reason for that, Our job is to 
understand it and figure out how to not let that happen! What it takes 
to do that is a bit more complicated.......
73, Kurt, K7NV
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