What's That Infrastructure? (Ep. 5 - Wireless Telecommunications)
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- Опубликовано: 4 мар 2017
- The airwaves are awash with invisible communications keeping us connected and facilitating our information society. All that telecommunication requires a lot of infrastructure! Today's episode of WTI shows some wireless telecommunications.
Have a cool infrastructure photo? Send it in the Whats.That.Infrastructure@gmail.com.
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Music: Elexive - Valley Santa ( • Elexive - Valley Santa... )
That rig at 2:55 is called a "cell on wheels" or CoW for short.
They tend to be used where additional coverage is temporarily needed. Often for special events and during emergencies. One can be up and running in less than a shift.
The yellow towers in quebec are for navigation, so things passing under the bridge make sure they dont crash into something. Tom scott made a video about it where he goes into detail about how they work
Hi Grady,
I live in rural northern California (i.e. not San Francisco) and use a WISP provider to watch your videos. I think it is around twenty miles line of sight. The content of your channel is excellent, and I want to thank you for your time and effort. Keep up the good work.
packratpyro greetings from urban socal!
packratpyro what speeds do you get?
At my parent's place in rural KY, they get about 200-300kb/s speeds on average, sometimes up to 1.5Mb/s on weeknights over our local WISP network. The bandwidth is painful and there are outages when the winds pick up, but honestly it's the best price for unlimited service in their area. I even used to game on it a little bit, but hated every second. I eventually resorted to tethering with my LTE connection to my phone before I moved out, it had better speeds and bandwidth for gaming. However, that wouldn't have been possible without a grandfathered wireless data plan, as it wasn't hard to use upwards of 50GBs/mo on that phone.
When everything is working right I get up to 6Mb/s down, 1.5Mb/s up.
I use a WISP and my connections is 50Mbps down by 5 up
Grady,
As a Freshman Civil Engineering major, I thank you for these videos. It's taking what I'm learning in the classroom and expanding it into an informative and entertaining video.
+Louis Lakey Thanks! Really glad to hear this!
You missed the opportunity to show all those funny "stealth" cell towers :D
Like ones made to look like palm trees
On my drive to school, there's one that's supposed to look like a pine tree, and it just looks like a giant pipecleaner sticking out of the ground
Gwen towers and chemtrails
@@zapdosarticuno6239 if covering chemtrails why not flat earth?
@Mark OnTheBlueRidge you can still see em
those feed horn antennas are amazing. we used them a lot in the cross Canada system. i am constantly amazed what was possible in the 50s and 60s. communication infrastructure, wireless especially has got to be my favourite.
as for the yellow tower toppers from Quebec, seeing as there is no visible feed lines and that most flat antennas are square they are most likely there to be visually appealing. They could be a sort of radar reflector however without more information i am just speculating, I'm also interested to know if anyone else knows for sure
I think I agree with Guillaume's photo - probably just an architectural feature. He didn't send a wider view, so it was hard to get any context.
In the Angeles National Forest in SoCal, there is (or was, I have not been there for a decade) large metal billboard type reflectors to bounce the microwaves around the mountain peaks. You could seed them on some of the hiking trails and truck roads in the mountains. This is what thy look like: static.panoramio.com/photos/large/81674253.jpg
To me it kinda looks like a bridge and my best guess would be that this is reflector for boat radar.
long-lines.net/places-routes/JohnDayPR_OR/passiverepeater.html
Remember flying things need to see masts too. Towers have blinking lights for that.
I do not think that they are radar reflectors because they are mounted to something already reflecting and the shape is wrong.
Yay, love this series. I learn so much.
You're an absolute gift to the RUclips world. The educational value combined with the production quality of your videos is astounding! Thanks for spreading knowledge and making great videos!
Been watching your channel for awhile, just started a job as a tower technician a couple months ago and brought me to this old video. Keep up the good work Grady! ❤️
Used to climb towers for a living. Mostly AT&T cellular work. Taking down those horns was great scrap money. You can’t find too many left but in Nevada and other super rural areas they’re still around.
Thank you for making such high-quality and engaging content.
This 'infrastructure' series is truly international, with pictures from all around the world. I was impressed that you obviously made an effort to pronounce the names correctly. Now all you have to do is completely rid your videos of SAE units.
Can we just take moment and applaud how very good Grady is at making enginerical drawings, by hand, which would make any cad engineer to heavily pant?
"CAD engineer" so... any engineer.
@@aval1998 he's good at it, yeah.. but not extraordinarily good
Engineers typically do not have great drawing skills...that skill set is exemplified by draughtspeople (PC version of draughtsman...or do we go with “draughts” just like chairman has become “chair”).
@@genau14zeichen the good ones do it in ink on vellum where correcting a mistake is very difficult.
@@aval1998 not software engineers, or bioengineers. I’m sure there are others
Thanks so much for doing this channel. As a Geomatics engineer I appreciate how you help explain our man-made world in easy to digest terms. Engineers need to do more of this!
In Canada our WISPs provide sub-par services in rural areas and only to those areas that are profitable. I am a part of a grass-roots organization called Clearwater Broadband Foundation that is trying to get a fiber network built in our county. We currently suffer from average speeds less than 5Mb/s at low-time and only around 50% of our residents are being serviced currently. Telus has brought in a cellular modem solution, but after only 2 months of the campaign, most are already noticing service degradation due to over-saturation of the sparse cell network in our county.
CBF's research, including examinations of counties in Washington state that did the same nearly 20 years ago, shows that not only is fiber a FAR better alternative for rural jurisdictions than it is for urban ones (especially those, like our own, that are geographically challenging for Wireless), but it is the cheapest infrastructure a community can build for itself (and it is cash-flow positive, even before consideration of broader community beneftis). No Investor owned ISP (large or small) is willing to do this for our county (mostly due to the payback period) so we've opted to get it done for ourselves. Our biggest struggle right now is finding educational material for our community engagement. People need to understand, as simply as possible, what fiber is and how it is different that wireless/cellular or the old school copper cables we used to get dial-up on.
Is there any chance you can help us out?
I'm watching this on a WISP in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania! I don't know anyone here with a wired data connection. I love your videos!
I absolutely love the WTI videos!
love this series. keep up the great work
Thank you for making this series, it's been fascinating.
Hey Grady! Just want you to know, your channel is fantastic. I am studying Civil Engineering here in Canada, and I watch your channel pretty often! Keep doing what you're doing, much love from up North!
thank you for doing this series. It's one of my favorite things recently. :)
I liked the video before I even start watching it, because I know your videos are always fantastic!
Really enjoyed this video series. Look forward to more! Thanks.
I know its been quite a while but I just came across this series and instantly recognized that AT&T antenna array as being just down the street from my hometown! Extremely strange to see it featured here! A bit of further context: it's the AT&T building in Bloomington, Indiana. (Home of Indiana University) Parts of it are boarded up but it seems to still be operating as an AT&T data center after all these years,, they certainly still own the building, there are a couple modern AT&T logos about. The antenna stand was built in 1970.
This channel deserves way more subs and likes than it gets. Oh well I'm just glad all the comments are so supportive due to him putting so much effort into researching these
Regarding the photo taken in Quebec. If this was part of a bridge structure could it possibly be a radar reflector for watercraft? Or perhaps small aircraft?
Perhaps. I did have a radar token on a previous WTI video, but it looked a little more "purpose-built". I'm thinking that these may just be for aesthetics.
Maybe its both? Engineers say "we need a radar reflector" and architecture says "ok, can we get away with something that looks like this"
Radar reflectors are numerous sheets of metal attached at right angles. Google image shows their construction.
It could be a "channel range marker" to indicate the center of the navigable channel under the bridge but those are almost universally red-white-red vertically striped.
I am familiar with the diamond shape radar reflector. I was simply thinking that it may have been a simple one to suit the overall structural design. With the simple 2 sides at right angles it would still amplify the reflection, just not as much as the typical ones. It was just a guess and completely assuming it was a bridge over a waterway.
A wider angle shot of the site would have been nice. Context is important when trying to figure out what something is.
Great job! I was missing these videos already!
Radio. Right up my alley :o) I wish I had known you were going to make this episode. I could have sent you all kinds of neat antenna pictures from around our NASA facility. Most of which are in my hands for use and maintenance.
Hehe, or mine from a tower maint trip for my local ham club on a tower we share with noaa :)
at 1:00 you mention crazy guy wires, those horizontal wires are actually part of the antenna itself... and the towers themselves are also usually part of the antenna in an installation like that (they will have giant insulators at the base of the antenna to isolate them from ground)
Bald Hills radio towers. Pretty cool stuff. Absolutely awe inspired every time I drive home.
Awesome channel man! Love all the interesting info 👍. Keep up the good work!
This is probably my favourite kind of video on the internet.
I live just south of Mount Wilson, Ca where a lot of wireless telecommunications towers reside. Years ago we went up to the observatory there and couldn't start our car, back then a Honda Civic, it was due to the very strong radio waves and the anti-theft system in the car.
I was waiting for it and was surprised you didn't show a picture of the disguised cell antennas. The ones that are supposed to look like pine trees and such. Great channel.
I love learning from your videos
Awesome videos. Love infrastructure. Can't wait for another.
I have to say you are definitely making my decision to switch to civil engineering very exciting. I have always found infrastructure interesting. I initially started going for mechanical engineering, but I found myself not enjoying the topics as much, so I started looking at the other engineering majors and civil engineering is definitely looking like my future.
Showing us an object that you don't know about is a great way to end the video. It stimulates conversation.
I believe that Guillaume took his picture on the new A20-A30 overpass. I haven't been able to locate the other end of the wireless path, if it is the case. I've been told there is load cells embedded in the concrete and some sensors elsewhere all over the overpass but none of them are wireless, with the exception of their gateway.
The only real possibility is they are part of a vehicle counting system, where antennas detects changes in the magnetism or are counting Bluetooth enabled devices. These are being deployed in large numbers by our DOT.
Keep up your good work.
At the beginning of the video, about the radio towers in Ethiopia: Most of those wires are not guy wires to hold it up, but actual VLF-HF (depending on what it actually is) transmission lines, or parts of the actual antenna. The cages are a dead giveaway. Google "Caged Dipole" for a simple example.
Hey Grady! Love the channel, and came back to this one hoping to learn about a little more about the wireless technology utilized in cell phones in addition to learning about the infrastructure which makes it all possible. I know it's not really civic engineering but I think a lot of people would be really interested to learn! There's so many different boxes and antennas on those towers, the mystery is killing me.
Sounds great!
Cool! That AT&T Tower is in Bloomington Indiana where I live.
Thank you for doing photo attributions where applicable.
Do one on Positive Train Control. Great as always, Grady.
I thought I saw a new video of yours, and tom scott started talking. What a surprise, and very good video!
I just watched the Infrastructure series and want more!
You are destined for 1m+ subs my friend. Keep up the grind.
Great stuff as always, Grady.
I love these videos. Super interesting.
I'm so glad I found this channel. I'll be binge watching your videos now!!!
Found you through Tom Scott..
Me too!
I use 100-200GB of data every month on my phone (mostly for wifi AP). I have unlimited 4G on my plan and it's 25€/month.
Thank you for your videos and keep them coming!
Love seeing these
I live in Indiana and we had one of AT&T's long rang antenna's up from the 50's up until two years ago. It was quite cool and looked like it was still in the 50's. I'm sad it's gone.
I work for a WISP and install the equipment for customers as well as climb on the towers you see in this video.
This video is great
found you through Tom Scott's channel. Great videos. Subbed!
When I lived in indiana, I had one of those AT+T towers right next to my house. I liked it since it made giving directions to my house really easy. I think it's gone now though.
Watched on my phone, but used wifi
Same
SciGuy watched on my black guy using slavery
Used a Samsung, did not explod.
Watched it on my walkie talkie, but used ethernet
I double checked to make sure I wasn't on data
enjoyed!
>> killer wi-fi pun here
+This Old Tony Haha good one!
This Old Tony Hi there ToT!
Just stumbled upon this series! I hope you can return to it someday!
Just like on 1:41 the same type "horn" transmitters was mounted on the top spot in our city to block radio station "Voice of America" signal, during Cold War. It started to transmit "beep", then news program was beginning, but not reacting on music. Later, they transmitted just one unmodulated frequency, and it was enough to disable common receiver circuits. But radio hobbysts figured out how to avoid it by own made receivers.
So no thank you for spending my hard earned Data on my computer to watch you? i see how it is... lmao
Haha I guess spoiled with no cap on my home internet. Not everyone has that! So thanks! :)
Practical Engineering My family in Jamaica still pays by useage for Internet! It's very expensive, so most people just visit Internet cafés except the wealthy. I'm very lucky to have unlimited and fast wifi, unlimited data on my phone, and access to the internet 24/7! We forget our privileges sometimes, and the hard work an innovation that brings those privileges.
You're welcome for the Mb's lol. This channel is always worth it
"Thank you for spending your hard earned megabytes to support this channel"
Damn you dont need to make me cry man, you channel's awesome!
Yhank you Pants. You maked mee laughf. Even tho pants ar not real.
Love these
You are like me, I love telecommunication and therefore antennas and always wondered what they are about.
Great stuff. How about a vid showing the limits of microwave distances in relation to earth curvature and altitude, to shut up some of the flatards?!
Great job btw!
From a Tower Climbers perspective, some advancements I've seen come on board are
1) Now fiber goes up the tower, along with DC power, and the radio units (gsm, lte, umts, wll, ect. Previously, all that stuff was on the ground, just RF equipment went up the tower (antennas, coax, and and TMA, Tower Mounted Amplifiers. The reasoning was that DB Loss would be much less, kinda like you loose amps when you use 300 ft of extension cord.
2)Antennas have come a long way! They used to just cover one freq. band, one Tx & one Rx, meaning transfer and receive. Now its not uncommon for me to be installing not a "2-port" antenna but 12-port antennas. New antennas cover a variety of freq bands. They even have antennas with built-in Radios now! Yes, they are very heavy.
There's Negatives Too:
1) From a safety perspective, and some WISPs are better than others, the amount of weight being added is a concern. Not so much with regards to the tower, but to the existing "Booms." Basically the steel apparatus that is attached to the tower and is responsible for the equipment being installed. .
2) The added equipment has to go somewhere, and it has to get there somehow. Basically, poses more obstacles for climbers to have to maneuver around. And the old block and tackle techniques are not ideal in some hoisting situations we find ourselves in. i remember when i could clip an antenna or two onto my hip and bring it where it needed to go, not anymore.
i predict, probably 30 years from now, the FEDS will jump in and have more over site over the industry, maybe require new tower designs, with the increased telecom equipment in mind.
The industry isn't in its infancy anymore, but it still has a ways to go before its what i would consider a mature industry.
+Dan Rooney Very interesting! Thanks for sharing those thoughts!
That would be cool if we could know what topics will be covered. This infrastructure thing is interesting, but too natural to realize that I should take a photo of it and send to you. After the video is published "oh why I didn't think about it". Some ideas would be great.
But the good weather comes, and after I repair my bike, I'll take a look with open eyes for these interesting but everyday stuff.
Thanks for the interning videos :)
1:10 is clearly the foot of a T-Rex. Thanks for the videos!
The only thing about this channel that I don't like, is that it needs more videos hehe keep 'em coming! :D
I wish you would have included a picture of the towers in Austin near Westlake. They’re so iconic!
Are you going to make more of these videos?
I suspect that those yellow rectangles, and the uprights they're attached to, are part of some signaling system related to that bridge.
Got a giant flagpole that hides several cellular antennas in the area. Seen it open once. I’ll snap a photo if I see it open again!
nice work
My only complaint with your channel is having to wait so long between videos. Love your channel!
This one has my favorite intro song
In Melbourne Australia the tram system ( built in 1884 ) is one of the biggest since in the 50s un like other cities like Sydney Melbourne kept the whole system. We are very lucky to have the world's largest tram system in the world. Cough U.S trams cough U.S public transport.
I wish you would make more of these
Hi Grady, absolutely love your videos! Is it possible for you to do perhaps less items but in greater detail? I really enjoyed the format of the first episode. Specifically, it would be great to see more about how an item is engineered and why it functions the way it does vs just identifying it. Thanks and keep up the good work!
Awesome!!
those yellow things could be signals to boat traffics radar that there is a bridge?
I think so, too. They reflect the radar signals and mark a narrow riverbed.
Read more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector
Maybe the yellow things are radar reflectors for the ground avoidance system on planes. Just guessing, i don't know if that system uses radar but i remember seeing somewhere a video about radar and that kind of concave shape was presented as a reflector, showing up much larger on radar than its physical shape..
I did ponder that. I commented that there is a third reflector on the other side of the bridge (visible in the lower right corner). Maybe planes frequently land or take off in this direction, which would explain markers at the top of a tower and only facing one way.
I work in an industrial/commercial area of southern California, high speed wired internet is ubiquitous. But fighting between service providers and owners/maintainers of the infrastructure (wiring, poles, etc) has led to astronomical prices. Luckily we have a WISP down the street from us, so we can get up to gigabit speeds if we wanted for much cheaper than the wired equivalents.
I live in a small village in Poland and have 36mbit up/down (limited by ISP) via WISP/WiFi and around 50mbit when using LTE. Its crazy when I compare it to the beginnings of mobile internet via GPRS.. (both with unlimited data and at a cost of around 20eur/month each)
Need more!
The old AT&T long lines microwave towers from the 50's-60's make great infrastructure tourism. They were spaced about 30 miles apart and used to carry a lot of telephone calls and video. They've been replaced by fiber optics, but some are still in service as cell towers or simply abandoned. With the cost of spectrum increasing, I would imagine that fiber optics are far cheaper per bit transferred, even with the increased cost of burying fiber everywhere.
The tower in key largo florida is really cool to see
Gosh, wish I knew this video was coming... could have provided tons of interesting cell tower pictures from working with the industry. Hidden cell towers are common in church steeples, flag poles, high school stadium lights (or atop other stadium infrastructure), and the famous fake trees of the Adirondack mountains. The "flag pole" hidden mounts are probably especially interesting since I'm sure people drive by those weird, 8"-16" diameter flag poles and wonder why they're so wide for just a flag that's not particularly high.
About those markers. My first insight was a radar reflector for a channel under that bridge. But these are not what most radar reflectors look like. Secondly, in the very lower right corner of the image you can see the top of the tower on the other side of the bridge, that tower has the same thing facing what would be the wrong way for a radar reflector. I was looking at Aids to Navigation info from the Canadian Coast Guard and did not find anything like this, but I did have one insight and that is Canada uses more yellow markers and buoys than we do in the USA. So maybe its a visual marker, but that still doesn't explain the "backwards" one on the other side of the bridge.
I worked for Western Electric in the early 70s and the microwave SOLID copper microwave tubing was very visible inside the telephone buildings. I can imagine that tubing is long gone, probably into someone's garage...
I was hoping this would be about the antennas I see hanging off everything around town. I see antennas on road signs, usually with a solar panel near. There are the little cylindrical silver ones. The ones poking out vertically or horizontally on the traffic light poles.
nooooooo!!!!! you totally missed all the disguised antennas (except for the last i guess) like those inside fake palm trees, or billboards n stuff.. the are everywhere.. great vid btw, keep it up!
I see those all the time. I can spot them from a mile away!!!
if i had known that you were doing this i would have sent you some palm tree cell towers
I love all of the new engineering videos, but I would be very happy if you would still come out with a wood working video every now and then.
Those yellow plates can be used to catch radio waves and redirect them. Or can be used for aircrafts.
RADAR retroreflectors.
Could go for a WISP around here or at least anything that's not Comcast
Comcast business mice, chewing one wire at a time.
MG222 yeh but you don't want TWC either so pass me a WISP here too
In my area, I literally have two options for broadband, and one wants me to pay them about $500 to expand their infrastructure to include my address. So, I only have one choice for broadband and they charge too much.
hey Grady !!
can u please make a video about how the microwaves get transferred through these antennas... and what all factors depend on the length, orientation, height etc. of the receivers and transmitters on these antennas
The antenna photo reminds me of a Bi-Static radar installation.
I really like your videos, but I felt like this one was basically just you showing viewer photos. I think the video could have had a bit more and been more structured. Still very interesting and I did enjoy!
That's really the premise of the "What's that Infrastructure" series. They are shorter, simpler videos that I can put together between the main project videos, and they offer a way for my viewers to participate in the channel.
Practical Engineering I've been following the series, I have just felt like I've learned more from previous episodes.
Practical Engineering Okay, I rewatched the video and there were some things I missed, so I wasn't probably paying attention fully for some reason. This is actually one of my favourite series on youtube, sorry for my unthought out comment. :-D
I disagree. I like the viewer input and learning about lots of different places
Also watching this from a WISP!
Except I'm the access point provider, they use this house as a potential access point for many nearby people.
I get the internet service for free and get speeds of around 80/80.
Too late to send in pictures of this equipment? Cause there's pretty neat 5GHz equipment on the roof for the backhaul and access points. Also a switch with backup battery in my closet.
They are going to upgrade it to 11GHz which is license pretty soon, bumping the max link speed to 500/500 full duplex (or 1gbps half dp)
Sounds amazing, I'm planning on doing Networking and Service Providing at collage and would love to talk to you on how things work
LOL, I am not the least bit surprised that Long Lines was the #2 reference.