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Here is the antenna they will be using... In other news, construction of the world's biggest Pringles can is now underway in Sudbury.

Yeah, don't confuse it with the CN Tower in Toronto, which is hugely gigantic.

It will be CN Tower! Next stop for the VIA Rail will be Space Needle, followed by Freedom Tower, former site of WTC Twin Towers.

Canada built a space needle, it has as far as I can tell no practicle purpose what-so-ever, but they built it to have a really tall building I think.

That'd be wrong.

"Defining the Toronto skyline, the CN Tower is Canada's most recognizable and celebrated icon. At a height of 553.33m (1,815 ft., 5 inches), it is the World's Tallest Building, an important telecommunications hub, and the centre of tourism in Toronto."

"Although the CN Tower inspires a sense of pride and inspiration for Canadians and a sense of awe for tourists, its origins are firmly rooted in practicality. The construction boom in Toronto in the 1960's transformed the skyline characterized by relatively low buildings into one dotted with skyscrapers. These new buildings caused serious communication problems. With its microwave receptors at 338 m (1,109 ft.) and 553.33m (1,815 ft., 5 inches) antenna, the CN Tower swiftly solved the communication problems with room to spare. As a result people living in the Toronto area now enjoy some of the clearest reception in North America."

Information from the official CN Tower website.

Ah yes, the Jetsons scenario. You forgot to mention that we'll all be living on top of towers like the Seattle Space Needle and CN tower in Toronto. So bring that water on, I'm itching to do a 60 story triple Lindy!

According to The Guiness Book of World Records, the tallest building is 553.33 metres or 1815 feet, 5 inches tall. By my calculations, this is taller than the building in the article. Blame Canada.

The CN-tower is actually the tallest free-standing STRUCTURE (not building).

The world's tallest STRUCTURE is the KTHI-TV tower in North Dakota (629m) -- it's supported by guy wires.

The world's tallest structure not supported by guy wires is the Petronius Platform (640m) but since its sits in the ocean it can be argued that it is supported by buoyancy.

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, who rate 'tall buildings', say the CN Tower isn't a building because it's not a "frame structure made with floors and walls throughout"

So, that leaves the CN Tower as the world's talles freestanding STRUCTURE - which seems to be completly ignored by the city of Toronto who still try to say it's The Worlds Tallest Building

Jason

Get your facts straight.

CN Tower
Think you're high enough now. Think again. Sky Pod, the World's Highest Public Observation Deck is located at a dizzying 447 m (1,465 ft.). Link Here

Taipei 101
Taipei 101 now also holds the highest roof (449 m) and highest occupied floor (439 m) titles. Link Here

I think your calculation is off 8 meters. Also, quoting from CNTower.ca, "At a height of 553.33m (1,815 ft., 5 inches), it is the World's Tallest Building, an important telecommunications hub, and the centre of tourism in Toronto." This would make the CN Tower the tallest still.

1815 feet 553 Meters http://www.cntower.ca/

I read some newspaper article about this very thing years ago (maybe when those towers in Malaysia opened?). At some point in the past, a group of architects (I don't remember the details) agreed that the height of the entire building, including ornamental spires would be used.

Granted the largest structure in the world still remains the CN Tower in Toronto.

Here's a site I stumbled across a couple years ago that supports both your criteria and that used to proclaim Taipei the tallest:

HEIGHT: The height of a building is measured from the sidewalk level of the main entrance to the structural top of the building. This includes spires, but does not include television antennas, radio antennas, or flag poles. Height is listed in both meters and feet and is rounded to the nearest integer. This is the official criterion used by the Council in determining ranking.

OTHER MEASURES OF HEIGHT: In an effort to reflect other aspects of the statistical height of a building, additional information is shown for buildings ranked in the top ten. (All of the following measurements begin at the sidewalk level of the main entrance of the building.)

To Structural Top: Height to structural top of the building (the Council's official criteria as defined above).

To Highest Occupied Floor: Height to the floor of the highest occupied floor of the building.

To Top of Roof: Height to the top of the roof.

To Tip of Spire/Antenna: Height to the tip of spire, pinnacle, antenna, mast, or flag pole.

Of course, the leaders in each of these categories claim that they are the "tallest building." Then of course there's the debate over whether radio towers such as the CN Tower count as buildings.

A nice way of putting it. The CN tower is all spire... (apart from the two-floor technical building nears its base...).

Interestingly enough, they used to market it as the "tallest free-standing structure" rather than the "tallest building", somehow adminitting it's not really a building... However, nowadays, they do say "tallest building".

If you make it up to Ontario, Canada you may want to check out the following:

• Niagra Falls tour the generating stations
• C.N. Tower
• The Trent Severn Waterway

If you start from New York, you can enter Ontario near the north-east tip of Lake Ontario, hit the Locks, C. N. Tower, and then Niagra Falls. You can then re-enter the US at Niagra Falls.

Or vice versa (enter through Niagra Falls).

I'm dubious one could make a concrete structure that could sway w/o breaking.

The CN Tower in Toronto Ontario Canada

http://www.cntower.ca/

Oh, I'm sorry, that really sucks.

There are a couple of things. If you have a cable TV provider, there is *no reason* why they'd have technical limitations to providing high speed access within their coverage areas - it's just a question of whether or not they're willing to spend all the money to retrofit all the distribution amplifiers to be bidirectional. After all, cable Internet is nothing compared to a TV channel in bandwidth. NTSC and PAL both require about 6MHz of bandwidth for video only; by contrast, through basically the same tricks as a 56k modem uses to get that speed on a 5kHz telephone line, my DSL achieves 1.2Mbps within about 192kHz of bandwidth. One allocated "TV channel" could serve hundreds of users.

Upstream is trickier, of course, but again, that's at least bidirectional RF distribution amplifiers, if not an inelegant but effective kludge like using your existing 56k modem and dial-up for uploading.

I'm judging from that you have either no cable television service nearby, or your CATV provider is pretty backwards. Sorry.

DSL is a very neat hack, but distance tends to attenuate the low-frequency RF carrier that the telco cleverly superimposes on your phone line.

Around here, we've got another option besides a cable monopoly and several DSL flavors: www.look.ca's "UltraFAST 2" wireless high-speed Internet service. Look started out offering a microwave relay-based alternative to cable television or satellite dishes, and when they bought out an ISP, this was the logical extension. I know a couple of their users, and they've been pretty happy with it. One of them is way out in the boondocks so he can't get cable or DSL, but with a little tower in his back yard, he's got line-of-sight to the CN Tower nearly 50 miles away - and therefore microwave "cable" television and wireless high-speed Internet access.

Look has also got points of presence on a few cellular and radio station towers around town, so they're apparently pretty easy to get if you can spot one of their POPs on the horizon.

(He's also an amateur radio operator, so the 75 foot tower already in his backyard helped him convince the installation technician that it would work... [grin])

Good luck getting something like that soon. Like I say, your only excuse is geographical.

The CN Tower in Toronto, Canada is the worlds tallest building and free standing structure.

It's 553.33m (1815ft) total, the observation deck is at 346m (1136ft), the 360 restaurant is at 351m (1150ft), and the Sky Pod observation deck is at 447m (1465ft, and higher than the top floor of either the sears tower or petronas).

The CN tower was built in 1976 and has held the titles of tallest building and free standing structure ever since.

I think I've met one american ever who got this question right. What's with you people?

Hmmm... Okay, CB works in the 27MHz band, which is for public use. While in some jurisdictions you're supposed to have a license for CB, most of the time it's not really policed.

CB is limited to (off the top of my head) 4W TX power for narrow-band FM modulation, 12W TX power for sideband operation. Lots of people (especially truckers, who, sterotypes aside, do like to use them) hop up CB radios, allowing for a longer range.

One way to hop it up is to stay with a 4W/12W TX setup, but to use an antenna that provides more gain. 3dB antenna gain will work in both receive and transmit, and will allow an effective radiated transmitter power of 8W/24W. 6dB antenna gain will be double that again. But, it's perfectly legal, since no more than 4W/12W of energy is being radiated, it's just being "amplified" the same way a gramophone horn works with audio.

The other trick, illegal for sure in both the USA and Canada, is to run a linear amplifier on the CB's output stage. 4W in, 40W out. It's not uncommon to see linear amplifier stages home-built than put out over 1kW of power in the 27MHz band. When it's on a moving vehicle, it becomes pretty hard to triangulate the position of the offending transmitter.

If your stereo was picking up noise in the tuner, it's probably because it's a poor quality tuner (not very selective), you have a poor antenna (tuned more for 27MHz than for broadcast FM) or everything is just misaligned.

If, however, it's coming in through your stereo when you're listening to a CD or something, you're far better off ensuring that all the parts of the stereo are properly grounded through some good, thick copper wire. Make sure that every connector on the thing is clean, since a little dirt or corrosion can make a detector similar to those blued razor blade detectors in foxhole radios built by troops at war (back in WWI and WWII).

I'd suggest that if you had a radio license yourself and gave them your call sign, they'd have been far more interested, because by the time you have a radiotelephone license, you're usually pretty good at ferretting out a problem.

The FCC probably didn't try too hard because of the same reasons Microsoft charges $xxx/minute for technical support: too many people call asking fairly basic questions, and they eat up a lot of labor.

If the CB radio in the background got drowned out more by the music playing, then the problem was clearly on your end, even if the guy was running a 5kW linear amplifier into a 12dB ERP antenna. The problem was clearly occurring *after* your volume control, and therefore in the audio output stages of your stereo system.

Cheap stereo.

The fact of the matter is that a good stereo should run fine right in the shadow of a TV station or even an AM radio station's 50kW transmitter. You can bet your ass that the local AM radio station, in order to get any sort of coverage and longevity out of his expensive equipment, is running that transmitter at its most efficient and into a well planned and well tuned antenna system. FCC be damned, the station's general manager is going to freak out if he's always paying for new output tubes in the transmitter.

So, buy a good stereo. This is the sort of performance difference that you can get by not buying your stereo at Wal-Mart.

My own stereo system shies away from the cheap-assed unshielded plastic crap of today. Parts of it I built myself. No RFI issues, even though I live within a clear line of sight of both the CN Tower (which was orginally built as a transmitter tower, but also happens to be the world's tallest building, Sears and Petronas towers be damned) and a large cellular/microwave relay tower that bristles with 120MHz range dipoles.

It consists of:

Acoustic Research AR-4x speakers, circa 1971.

Speaker cables, 12 gauge HPN heater cord with 1/4" connectors. (Note that this is not overpriced consumer-grade gold-plated crap like Monster Cables; mine are just solid engineering.)

Sound A-5000 solid-state stereo amplifier, circa 1975, point to point wiring, steel chassis. (Output stages replaced with lower noise, more modern transistors.)

Preamplifier - homebuilt, mounted into steel chassis of A-5000. Uses two 12AT7 twin-triode vacuum tubes, all parts surface-mounted on a home-etched circuit board with a ground plane. Tube filaments are powered by rectified and filtered 6V power, to reduce cathode hum. The entire preamplifier section is housed in an old steel cigar box that just happened to fit, and makes a great shield for the tubes. Why tubes? Yeah, you can do the same thing better with good MOSFETs, but when your B+ is 12V, 1.2V of induced noise is 10% of your signal. With tubes, when your B+ is 120V, the same 1.2V of induced noise is only 1% of your signal.

NAD 3340 CD Player.

RCA patch cables are not used to connect the CD player to the amplifier. The NAD has balanced outputs, and the amplifier has balanced inputs, so I use XLR patch.

No tuner. I use my Sony clock-radio to listen to Howard Stern in the mornings.

Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16 ISA - output stages were LM741, replaced them with low-noise version. Now, if only I could somehow get the D/A converter *out* of the computer...

Audio output from the SoundBlaster is, unfortunately, unbalanced. (Besides, there are lots more things that would induce noise into a sound card, not just unbalanced patch.) Good quality (not the gold-plated Radio Shack blister-packed crap) RCA to RCA patch cable to the amplifier.

You don't need to be that extreme to get good sound, though I will admit that MP3s have never sounded so good.

<grin>