VCTowers

VCTowers Tower. Antenna. Communications Infrastructure. Field work, inspections, and close-out documentation. New England and beyond.
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06/13/2026

This anchor holds the entire tower up. And it’s about to disappear forever.

Four and a half feet down in a hole that’s 6 by 4 — standing in it, having the other guy pass me the rebar cage we built so it can get set before the concrete goes in. Every guy anchor on a tower carries a share of the load that keeps the whole structure standing in the wind. Get this wrong and nothing above it matters.

In about an hour all of this is buried under concrete and nobody ever sees it again. The cage, the placement, the depth — it all gets judged once, right now, before the pour. There’s no inspecting it later. There’s no fixing it later. It either gets built right at this stage or it’s a problem waiting for the first big storm.

Would you trust a tree to do this job instead?
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06/13/2026

This antenna had to come down in one piece. There was no clear path to do it.

Shorty 40 coming off the top of the tower with trees on every side and one tight window between them to work with. The client is relocating it to another site and reusing it, so dropping it or catching an element in the branches wasn’t an option — a bent element is fixable, but creates extra friction for our customers that we don’t want. A straight vertical lower is the least desirable process, so we rigged a tram line through the only gap we had and brought it down on a controlled angle, three of us working the descent together to keep it tracking through the opening.

This is the part of the job that doesn’t fit in a manual. Every site is different. The trees, the tower position, the approach angle — you read what you’ve got and you build the rigging plan around your access. There’s no catalog solution for threading a Yagi down through a hole in the canopy without touching a branch. You figure it out on the ground before anyone pulls a foot of rope.

Access is half the job. Solving the clients problem is the second half. Getting it down clean was the request, and that’s exactly what happened.
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06/11/2026

We lowered this entire tower with a rope wrapped around a tree.

Controlled decommission — 50 foot telescoping tower, nested down to its shortest height, then hinged over on the base plate in one continuous move. The rope takes the load the whole way down, and wrapping it around the tree trunk works exactly like a portawrap: friction does the braking, the guy on the rope just manages the feed. Two guys on the back, two lower ones on the front to keep it tracking straight as it comes over.

No crane. No gin pole teardown. Just physics, rope management, and knowing exactly how much friction you need before you commit. Put it on the trailer and we were off the site — full decommission in 2 hours.

The same trick that fells a tree limb safely takes down a tower. Friction is free if you know how to use it.
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06/10/2026

The difference between moving concrete and moving wheelbarrows all day.

We're building a turnkey 60-foot tower on a site where the concrete truck can't get close to the foundation locations. The buggy showed up before the digging started because the logistics problem had to be solved before the concrete ever arrived.

Most tower foundations fail before the first yard of concrete is poured. Access, planning, and material handling determine whether the pour is efficient or turns into hundreds of trips across rough ground.

The terrain usually decides what equipment gets rented.

06/09/2026

The tower doesn’t go up until this is right. And right now it’s still wet.

CB1G Rohn spec foundation for a 60 foot Rohn 45G rated to 90mph wind load. Cage assembled and lowered on site, pier pin set, and now the first concrete is going in. Cuts mid pour because that’s where we are — this part takes as long as it takes and we’re not rushing it.

We come back in a month when it’s cured and the fun part starts. Stacking steel.

Most people only ever see the tower. Nobody sees what’s in the ground holding it up. This is what that looks like before it disappears forever.
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06/08/2026

25 feet up. Portable bandsaw. One cut. No room for mistakes.

Wait for the moment the antenna finally breaks free

How much would someone have to pay you to do this?

05/23/2026

The tower version of your buddy saying hold my beer and watch this

Half inch turnbuckle grown into a tree. Back end fully consumed by bark — been there long enough that whoever installed it has long forgotten about it. This is somebody’s guy point. Not a Rohn engineered anchor, not a concrete deadman, just an unknown termination

We run into this kind of stuff almost every other site in the amateur tower world. The conversation on install day went something like “that tree isn’t going anywhere” and everyone nodded and moved on. And they’re not wrong — trees are incredibly strong. But strong and properly terminated are two completely different things. The load path through a grown-in turnbuckle is unknown. There’s no way to inspect the termination, and no engineered rating on any of it

When we get called out to do work on a structure like this, our first job before we ever leave the ground is walking the guy points and the foundation. When we find something like this we are not working on that tower until we have temporary guy points rigged and we feel confident the structure is stable beneath us. There is no way of knowing what that turnbuckle looks like behind that bark or how much holding power is left. We have to account for that before anyone goes up.

Your guy anchors should be in the ground. Not in a tree. Can we please stop doing this
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The weight of your mast and antennas belongs on the rotator. Not the thrust bearing. This is one of the most common misc...
05/18/2026

The weight of your mast and antennas belongs on the rotator. Not the thrust bearing. This is one of the most common misconceptions in ham radio tower work and I got into it with a client about it this weekend on a rotator install.

The thrust bearing at the top of the tower is there to keep the mast plumb and centered. It handles lateral side load. It is not engineered to carry vertical dead weight — and here's the thing — not a single major manufacturer publishes a vertical load rating for their thrust bearings. Not DXEngineering. Not Rohn. Not Yaesu. There is no number because it was never designed to carry that load.

The rotators are what carry the weight. Yaesu G-1000DXA is rated 440 lbs vertical. Hy-Gain T2X handles over 1,000 lbs. The M2 Orion OR2800PX is rated 1,800 lbs vertical with an internal thrust bearing rated at 2,000 lbs. These are published numbers. The Yaesu G-1000DXC manual specifically states that installing a thrust bearing does NOT remove mast weight from the K-factor calculation — because the rotator is still carrying it.

Snugging your thrust bearing down tight to lift weight off the rotator is a workshop myth. Not a spec-driven procedure. Your rotator was designed for this load. Let it do its job.

If you are planning a mast and antenna installation and want it done right, reach out to VCTowers
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05/15/2026

Tape isn’t rated for rigging. For a 3 pound TV antenna, it was perfect.

This is where tower work gets to have a little fun. Lightweight TV antenna, 75 ohm coax, 45 feet up. Ground guy couldn’t rig from the top — cheap plastic clip on the antenna would have come apart — so he taped it up and sent it. I grabbed it, untaped it, and installed it. Two people, zero drama, antenna on the wall.

The rigging decision matches the load. A capstan hoist and a tram line for a 3 pound antenna would be overkill. Tape sent it up clean and safe and we all went home on time. Knowing the difference between those two scenarios is the job.

Sometimes the antenna weighs less than your lunch
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05/15/2026

145 feet to change two lightbulbs. This time we actually show you the lightbulbs

Steel band off, red glass off, old bulb out, new LED in — times two because it’s a dual arm fixture. Then everything goes back exactly the way it came off. Verified power at the top before we came down.

The bulb swap takes four minutes. The climb is what takes time

Some jobs look simple from the ground. This one actually is simple. Just not from the ground
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