Communiqué
Photo Slideshow: Helicopter Removes Old Antenna from Top of WOUC Tower
< < Back to photo-slideshowRemoval operation was finished in about 20 minutes
ATHENS, OH – Those living near Cambridge may have wondered what was going on last Thursday (July 2) when they saw a helicopter flying close to the WOUC TV Transmission Tower. The helicopter was removing an old 47-foot-long, 4800-pound antenna that was no longer in use from the top of the tower.
“The antenna that was removed was used for our WOUC TV broadcast channel from 2005 until 2019,” said WOUB Chief Technology Officer Steve Skidmore. “We had to install a new antenna for the WOUC TV broadcast station due to the FCC mandated spectrum repack.”
The “spectrum repack” required many TV stations to change frequencies in recent years to make room for more wireless services. The U.S. Congress authorized the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to institute the change.
The repack moved the WOUC over-the-air channel from UHF channel 35 to VHF channel 6. The existing antenna could not transmit television signals on the newly assigned channel 6 broadcast frequency, so WOUB purchased and installed a new channel 6 antenna on the existing tower in January of 2019.
WOUC TV ceased broadcasting on the old UHF channel and began on the new VHF channel in late February of 2019. The old antenna had to be removed due to the possibility of overstressing the existing tower structure.
“The removal was conducted by FDH Infrastructures, which was also the manufacturer of the existing tower,” said Skidmore.
“We chose to utilize the helicopter crane method of removal as it minimizes the need for down time to our existing WOUC TV and WOUC FM broadcast services already on the tower,” he said.
“The normal procedure for removing a top-mounted antenna of this size would have required a crew of climbers and several days of adding equipment and rigging to the tower, in addition to a full day to lower the antenna to the ground, and another couple of days to remove their rigging and equipment from the tower,” said WOUB Broadcast Transmission Supervisor Ken Cash.
“During that time, we would have been off the air. It was discussed early on that a long outage was not an option. We devised a plan that allowed us to be on the air with the new channel and remove the old antenna with minimal down time,” said Cash. “In fact, we were able to complete the project with no down time and that means our viewers didn’t even know this was happening.”
The helicopter was on the site, located about 16 miles east of Cambridge, for about three hours. The actual antenna removal operation was finished in about twenty minutes.