Sky Signal
Posted on | January 22, 2008 at 9:40 am | 3 Comments
It occurs to me I have not updated my loyal out-of-town readership lately on the status of the Denver Digital TV Supertower, of which I wrote so many blog entries decrying the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) mentality of the residents in the area. Looks like my last entry on the subject was way back here. About a year ago, the US Legislature passed a bill with bipartisan support ordering the tower to be built, and President Bush signed it into law. So that about wrapped it up for the foes of the tower, i.e. the residents of Lookout Mountain who bought their property knowing full well that they lived in a TV tower zone and that it wasn’t going to just go away no matter how much they opposed new construction. Opposing the new tower was especially ludicrous since the new one was going to replace several other ones that would be torn down, decreasing the footprint, visual pollution, and radio frequencies in the area. It’s like if you bought a house near an airport and then the airport people said they wanted to replace all the small runways with one long one which would have fewer planes taking off every day, and you opposed that. These people were just crazy. Of course their ultimate goal was to get all the towers off the mountain. But again, why would you even buy a house there in the first place if you didn’t like that? I just don’t get it. Those towers have been there forever.
But I digress. After some more local legal wrangling, construction on the new tower has begun in earnest. Updates on construction can be found here. It’s supposed to be done by this spring, though I’m not sure when it will actually be on line. Again, at this point I don’t really care that much, except that it’s a victory for common sense and for people who could only get HDTV over the air. The conversion to digital TV is supposed to happen by Feburary 2009, and it looks like Denver will actually be able to make the deadline this time. We are the last major market without high power, long range digital TV. I can get most of the local network stations in HiDef over the satellite (aside from the local CW affiliate), but it will be nice to be able to have the alternate means. Green Mountain blocks my path to Lookout Mountain somewhat, but I can still get the lower power existing DTV stations from there, so I should be able to get the high power ones when they come online.
Here’s a photo (click to embiggen) I took back in June 2006 when I drove up Lookout Mountain to take a look at the existing towers. I assume this will be torn down. I’ve got a whole bunch of photos from that trip that I never got around to putting on Flickr. I need to do that someday. And I’d like to ride up there again sometime soon and see if I can catch them constructing the new tower. The winding drive up that mountain is always a lot of fun and just the thing for a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Latre.
Comments
3 Responses to “Sky Signal”
January 22nd, 2008 @ 8:01 pm
In Baltimore the place with all the antennas is called TV Hill and is a major landmark because it is right off the highway.
January 23rd, 2008 @ 7:30 am
One word: equity. The reason people buy houses near TV towers or airports is because they are cheap. The reason those people work to have the TV towers removed or the airport relocated is because their property values will skyrocket. It isn’t insanity or stupidity, it’s greed.
January 23rd, 2008 @ 4:16 pm
Lisa, nice explanation. I guess the tower removal would “embiggen” their pockets!