If you had a choice: Gin Pole or Crane

Hello tower climbers!

First off, I got the pictures from http://www.waverlycraneinc.com/towergallery.php showing a monopole they were erecting. Thank you Waverly Crane and Consulting services, Inc.

I had another post on Gin Poles, https://wade4wireless.com/2014/01/25/gin-pole-overview/ back in January and I thought that I would follow-up with some more information on gin poles. Gin poles are something that people really seem to like to talk about even though they are not as common as they once were.Now I know they have different applications and are used in different situations. I am only going to address areas where we could use either.

I think that more and more companies are going to pay for the crane if the site is accessible and practical. Most tower crews like the gin pole because they have complete control and they can work at their own pace. When you have a crane you pay for every minute that they are there so you want to be sure everything is ready for the crane. What I mean by that is that the tower has to be prepped for what you are mounting and that all of the hardware is ready to be mounted. If you have the crane for a day, you want to make sure you get done with it in a day if at all possible.

So what if you had a choice? Think about it, what would you choose if you had to add 3 20’ sections to a 200’ self supporting tower? Crane or gin pole? What about a 200’ guyed tower? Would you choose a crane over a gin pole for construction or adding sections to a tower? (I know with Monopoles you need to use a crane, it’s the best way to work on most monopoles.) Let me know in the comments or on Facebook.

I think that safety is really going to be an issue with future work, so I think that cranes will be used more and more if they can do the job. Most tower guys that are experienced with gin poles would know that they could do the job without any incidents. However, someone who is new to working with gin poles probably should not be taking on the work unless they know a crane can do it. Pretty obvious to me and yet people bid on jobs they should not be doing. We see it all the time.

Get your copy of the Wireless Deployment Handbook eBook that covers professional carrier end to end deployment of LTE small cells, CRAN, and DAS to show you the proper way to plan for deployment then execute, planning and action without the mistakes

That’s it for this week, I have my books for sale, “Field Worker’s Aid for Tower Site Work” and “Tower Climbing: An Introduction”. I am working on a podcast which I will call my BlogCast. It is taking awhile to get it going but I plan to have it up on iTunes by the end of June. I have some samples out with some of my blogs, let me know what you think, you can hear one of them here, it’s not pretty. I also added it here to my existing blog post. Let me know what you think. I am also building my new website and it’s taking longer than I thought.