Do planes crash into towers at all??
It is my understanding that strobe lights are required during the daytime. To save money, the strobe lights are often used at night also. It simply costs more to put on two lights. I imagine if 'towers' were out in the parks, they would be very short so they would not require lights at all.
Cell phone antennas are all over Minneapolis if one looks carefully. The roof of NE Middle School has one, the small chimney on St. Anne's Church at 26th and Broadway; towers are often unnecessary in an urban environment. They are even experimenting with using trees.
I responded to a couple of people off-list regarding lighting of cell towers. I've done some further research, and want to amend what I said to them, as well as make the information available to the rest of the list.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has authority to require mitigating measures to enhance safe air navigation with respect to objects affecting navigable airspace under federal law (49 CFR Part 77). Such regulations once accepted by the FAA are not optional and are not negotiable by any state or local form of government.
Basically, any construction or alteration of an object which exceeds 200 feet above ground level comes under these requirements (there are other specific criteria for objects in proximity to airports, etc. but we will ignore those for simplicity).
Very few, if any, cell phone antenna towers in an urban area would ever be that tall. Most current cell phone antennas are already located on top of existing structures, e.g. buildings and water towers. The antennas I have seen (a reasonable but not statistically valid sample) in urban cities that are on free-standing poles, appear to be no more than 60 to 80 feet in height. There are 2 of them, for example, less than 2 blocks from my house, visible from my yard and windows.
So any kind of lighting would NOT be required for virtually any cell phone antenna tower placed in a park (unless near the airport, or a hospital helipad).
And contrary to what I wrote to these individuals, red or white lighting choices are recommendations. Each obstructing object above 200 feet has to have forms filed with the FAA, and the FAA appears to decide on a case by case basis, with some flexibility for variations and accomodation for urban areas, for example, included. For example, one FAA document actually suggests using red lights instead of white lights in urban areas so as to less bother the neighbors.
Here are some links:
Large PDF document outlining all of this from the FAA: http://www.faa.gov/ats/ata/ai/circV.pdf
Starting point for FAA obstructions regulations: http://www.faa.gov/arp/ace/part77.htm
I'd also like to comment briefly on the idea that cell phone antennas may go the way of the stone tablet in the near future. While we no longer use coal-fired steam engines as our primary train locomotives today, the wires that formed the initial telephone systems more than a century ago are still in use. More of them are underground or bundled than in the old days, when telephone poles were draped with many of them, but they are still there. By the sheer popularity of cell phones and based on the physics of how they operate, I don't think we will see cell phone antennas on poles and other elevated structures disappearing in any meaningful way in the next 30 years. They may become smaller and easier to place, but the spectrum in which they operate is unlikely to change radically enough to allow completely different antenna arrangements (i.e. lower or further apart).
I'm no big fan of urban eyesores like industrial looking towers and billboards, but cell antennas are not necessarily that bad, and we are, after all, in a city, not the countryside.
A few 10-year leases on cell phone poles are a lot easier to get rid of in the future, than a hydro-power plant and major bridge alteration to the Stone Arch Bridge. Let's keep things in proportion.
Chris Johnson Fulton
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