Antennas

Nextel Communications Inc., one of the smaller cellular telephone companies, is leading the way in Howard County in trying to help curb the proliferation of communications towers.Last week, the New Jersey-based company became the first to respond to county planners' urging to put such structures on county property and build them strong enough to hold other antennas. It asked for a special zoning exception for a proposed 250-foot, three-sided, latticework tower off U.S. 1 near Savage.Besides being strong enough to accommodate other cellular companies' equipment, the tower will offer a prime location for a new antenna for the county police, fire and rescue radio system.

Some disgruntled viewers remain in the dark after last week's digital television switch-over. "We were not able to watch 60 Minutes on Channel 13," said Hanuman Agrawal, 73, a retired Owings Mills resident. "My wife had to read her magazine and books. It was an enormous inconvenience." Television stations say the problems are largely confined to households with antenna problems, or those where digital converter boxes have not been reset to account for frequency changes at some stations.

Anne Arundel County Administrative Hearing Officer Robert C. Wilcox has approved a zoning exception that allows American PCS Limited Partnership to add six communications antennas on a building in an industrial park in Linthicum Heights.The antennas, part of a transmission network for cellular phones and other wireless communications, will be placed on the roof of a 111-foot-tall building owned MM&P Mates Program at Aero Drive and Maritime Boulevard.There was no opposition at the zoning hearing, and Mr. Wilcox approved the request last week.

Laura Wilson thought she was ready for the much-anticipated conversion from analog to digital over-the-air TV. The 73-year-old Bolton Hill resident bought digital converter boxes for both her sets, and she had volunteers from Americorps stop by her apartment last week to make sure she was all hooked up. But when local stations ended analog transmissions Friday afternoon, Wilson punched up her local channels and the screen on her living room set read...

Two former top officials of Nurad Inc. of Baltimore were sentenced to federal prison yesterday after pleading guilty to filing false statements that antennas they manufactured for the F-16 jet fighter met Air Force specifications."

County Planning Board members will hear testimony Thursday on a plans for a 116-foot cellular telephone antenna pole for downtown Clarksville -- nearly three times as high as regulations permit.The pole would be the third structure built in the county by Southwest Bell Mobile Systems Inc., which operates the Cellular One telephone system in the Mid-Atlantic area.The pole would be built behind Zimmerman's Home Center on Route 108 and would be topped with an array of nine cellular antennas.

MOSHAV IDDAN, Israel -- When it comes to bird-watching, Dieter Peter and Thomas Steuri are no featherweights.They and a team of Swiss ornithologists camp in the searing heat of the Negev desert, rarely bothering with binoculars. They track birds with two radars, space-age infrared scopes and computers that record every wing beat.Their goal is to figure out how many birds could die if this patch of desert were to sprout a huge array of radio antennas, as the United States wants.The Israel Supreme Court wants to know how migrating birds will be affected by the proposed transmitting facility for the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, all run by the U.S. government.

Unable to ban cellular phone towers outright because of federal law, Baltimore County officials are hoping to keep them as unobtrusive as possible under a bill introduced at last night's County Council meeting.The bill -- sponsored by all seven council members -- would encourage new antennas on existing buildings, utility towers and other structures, and would discourage or regulate them in rural and residential areas.The proposal pleases cellular phone companies because it would make it easier for them to put antennas on existing structures.

Responding to complaints from residents about the proliferation of cellular telephone towers, the Baltimore County Council is considering a 120-day halt to the approval of antennas in rural areas.Councilman T. Bryan McIntire, a north county-Owings Mills Republican who sponsored the bill, said he wants to stop approvals until the council can adopt countywide regulations governing the placement of antennas."We need to put a hold on it until we can properly regulate it," he said.Controversy over the towers has erupted across the nation in recent years, driven by the increasing popularity of cellular telephones.

Facing opposition from many neighbors and church members, St. Pius X Roman Catholic Church near Towson has decided against locating a cellular phone tower on its property -- forgoing thousands of dollars in rental fees."

The Chicago Cubs traded second baseman Mark DeRosa to the Cleveland Indians yesterday. Some of you are asking if this means that the on-again, off-again trade talks involving Brian Roberts and the Cubs might be on again. ( For more, go to baltimoresun.com/schmuckblog)

For months I've been urging readers who get their TV service the old fashioned way - over the air, with an antenna - to apply for a pair of government coupons. Each provides $40 toward a converter that will keep an analog TV working when the nation's broadcasters switch to digital transmissions on Feb. 17, 2009. My coupons arrived over the weekend, so in the interest of science, I bought Best Buy's Insignia converter box and hooked it to a couple of TV sets to see what would happen. What I learned surprised me, and may surprise you. When it comes to old-fashioned analog TV reception, all sets are not equal.

My parents have a 20-year-old TV. They want to buy a new TV for the change to digital rather than buying a digital converter box for over-the-air reception. They do not have cable, and they are not going to get cable. Can they buy an LCD, plasma or DLP TV and use an indoor antenna to get reception? They will not put up an outdoor antenna. - James Young I use an indoor antenna with my HDTV (I also have cable, but I am able to use the indoor antenna as well) and get a good signal. It's all a question of how strong the signal is from their location.

A 22-foot German radar antenna, once used by Nazi forces to track Allied bombers in Europe during World War II, found a new home yesterday in Linthicum, the latest exhibit at the Historical Electronics Museum. In a cold breeze, a handful of museum members and staff grinned and snapped pictures as a crew of four professional aircraft movers unloaded sections of the "Wurzburg Riese" (Giant Wurzburg) dish antenna from two flatbed trailers after a two-day drive from Omaha, Neb. "It's in good shape," said Ralph Strong, a 1991 Westinghouse retiree and former president of the museum's board of directors.

If you have TV sets that pull in stations through antennas, listen up. The federal government will give you two vouchers worth $40 apiece to buy converters to keep those sets from going dark when broadcasters switch from analog to digital signals in less than two years. We don't know when the vouchers will be available, but when they are, sign up right away -- because there may not be enough to go around. If the government is going to take away the TV broadcasts you've been perfectly happy with, it might as well pay part of the cost to keep your set alive.

People zipping off to work early on a summer morning might notice the beat-up station wagon parked by a skinny stretch of trees in Woodlawn. What they probably won't see is the burly man ducking into the woods with an empty bucket and a net strung between wood poles. "Soon as you walk in these woods, you're going to see things you're not going to believe," says Ed Sonn, 57, a retired construction worker who visits this spot four times a week in warm weather. As he walks down a dirt path, Sonn points out raccoon prints and deer tracks.

Howard County is banking on a unique approach to market publicly owned land to a telecommunications industry that's desperately seeking sites for cellular phone antennas to bring millions of dollars a year into county coffers.Though other area jurisdictions have made money from cell phone companies renting antenna locations, Howard is the only one aggressively pursuing these customers.County officials have identified 74 publicly owned sites for clustering antennas and have hired a company -- Apex Site Management based in Conshohocken, Pa. -- to market them to cell phone companies willing to pay a monthly rent to place antennas on the sites.

DELAND, Fla. -- Usually she begins at night or dawn: hopping barbed-wire fences, creeping where she can up stairwells, climbing high ladders and girders.Her goal is elevation, the height she can reach by sneaking onto the roof of a skyscraper or the top of a radio tower. The practice is known as "stealing altitude": risking arrest to reach a precipice. For a moment she is still, and then she leaps off, free-falling through space and parachuting down -- a kind of Russian roulette with shadows and distance and time.

The aging global antenna network that keeps NASA in touch with its most distant space probes is fragile and may not be able to meet rising demands for its services, according to a government report. A review of NASA's Deep Space Network by the General Accounting Office found that portions of the 40-year-old system are shut down 16 hours a week for repairs and maintenance, on average. The GAO report to the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics cited three antenna outages in just five months last year that resulted in the loss of 241 minutes of science data from the Stardust, Deep Impact and three Mars orbiter missions.

Should Baltimore allow heavy telecommunications equipment to remain on the roof of a public landmark, when the size and weight of that equipment may threaten the building's structural integrity? That's the question raised by an emergency repair project under way at City College, the public high school known as the "Castle on the Hill." In December, the city school board allocated $372,000 to hire a contractor, J.A.K. Construction Co., to repair cracks and leaks in the school's tower, where a dozen large cell phone antennae have been mounted over the years.