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.

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?"

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

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.