Vanishing Mobile Phone Masts

babycakes writes "The BBC has an article about the concealment of mobile phone antennae in the UK, where the masts have been disguised as clock face hands, chimneys and so on. The company behind them, The Undetectables (flash site) aim to 'eradicate this architectural acne' - pics available."

Comments

And in church steeples

[MongooseCN]

Down in Cape Cod in Wellfleet, there is a cell phone antennae inside of a church steeple (I forget which one). The church gets paid something like 50,000-100,000$ a year to hold the antennae. The church doesn't do anything with the antennae, they just rent out the space to hold it.

I wish some phone company put an antennae in my chimney. I could quit working.

NY can use their help..

[Frank of Earth]

.. they decided to throw some fake looking tree branches on a HUGE tower just outside of NYC.

Here is the article, but unfortunately I can't find a picture. Article

I guess it would have slightly blended in if it wasn't 100' taller than the tallest tree.

Re:This antenna cannot be seen

[McCart42]

for those that don't get this joke, watch Monty Python or see this script. You really should see the clip itself though...it's PRICELESS.

Will the building's maintainers know about it?

[shess]

A couple years ago, the city I grew up in (Pipestone, MN) repainted (or otherwise maintained) their water tower. While the guys were up there, they took down some antenna, because neither they, nor anyone at city hall, could figure out why they were there.

Turned out to be a repeater installed twenty years ago by the local radio station, with city permission.

So now I'm imagining some roofer coming down off the roof and telling the homeowner "Uh, listen, you have a chimney up there which doesn't connect to anything. I think it might be causing your leak, do you want me to get rid of it?"

Portland, Oregon's solution..

[s0l0m0n]

seems to be putting more, small recievers on top of utility poles. Reaps several benefits, increased revenue for an already cash straped goverment, and better reception for Portland wireheads.

Here's a quote from the Willamette Weekly, a local paper, "Health skeptics may protest, but cell-phone users may be headed toward better reception. New cell-phone towers may sprout on utility poles all over the city under a new proposal, spearheaded by Commissioner Sten's office, in which cell-phone companies would pay the city for the privilege."

josh

The one in NYC

[RazorRamon]

If you are on I-95 in the NYC Yonkers area you'll see a cell phone tower rigged on top of a yellow brick chimney like that. I saw it a while ago and it was a wierd technology meets old-school type of feeling.

Re:Not super new

[Jonny 290]

I live in the bottom floor of an apartment building (my apt is actually half underground). I looked at the side of it and said, "Hey. Look at those six runs of 1.5" PVC running down the side of the building for HVAC drainage." I just bought another length of the same color and size PVC, used some brackets to bolt it to the side of the building, and put a 2m 5/8" wave and a multiband vertical VHF dipole in the top.

I was out chatting with my landlord and watched her stare straight in that direction and not even think about it.

Keep it QRP, though. :D

Other good reason to hide antennas...

[atomico]

...is the media-fed hysteria going around in some countries, arguing some (never proven) effects in human health. Where I live (Spain), some parents took their children away from school because there were cell masts nearby. Even after the mobile operator disconnected that base station, there were some diehards who did not allow their children go back to school -well, then it must have been antenna aestetics.

Of course, media have never realised that there are much powerful transmitters of electromagnetic signals everywhere... starting with their very own broadcast signals.

Re: The Undetectables (flash site)

[yorgasor]

It gets better. Run 'top' while you're viewing this page with mozilla or netscape 4. It's really neat to watch the amount of memory being used. After just a minute of the constant reloading, the browser takes up a few hundred MB of memory. It's a really neat trick when you're trying to compile a massive project at work on your machine at the time and all of a sudden you run out of memory.