Ah, the plot thickens. It's a word of mouth only thing and is a "beta" service they are working on to see if there is demand. Well, there is, sign us up!

The truck comes out and measures and at the tippy top of the boom truck and barely has enough signal. Hrm John says and plans a tower taller than the boom truck and on the uphill side of the house (about 6' taller than the driveway area he was in).

That very day our hero drove off to Kansas City to buy the tower from National Electronics, a place where the prices were cheaper than anywhere else and local so we could save 200$ in shipping. Yay!.

Click on any picture to see a larger version. Most pictures were captured at 2048x1024 and John can email those to you if you'd like.



Here is the tower arriving that afternoon.

A closer view of the goodies.

Funny thing is this stuff doesn't store well. I finally figured out just to lay them on the groud and let them get dirty :).

First, we had to cut a tree down. It was in the way and would have hit the tower. David helped so much here. Thanks David!

Here's another view of the tree and it shows the mounds of sand and gravel for the footing.

More of the tree cut down day. I was so tired of hauling limbs that I took way too many pictures :).

Um. Yeah, more.

Getting tired of this yet ?

Say bye bye to the truck! It's the end of the day and we're heading in ...

The next day I got out and hacked the rest of the trunk up, and finsihed cleaning the limbs.

Loaded up and ready to go to the wood pile.

Rest In Peace Tree. We'll burn you later :).

I got a great deal on the rebar. I decided to cut the last bit myself because I wanted to and they wanted 50$ / hour to cut it.

I did cheat and had several people dig the hole for me. This is the how we were leaving it so the hole would dry up. We had a tremendous amount of rain this spring.

Katie decided she had to be with daddy. Since she was out, she decided to help by picking up sticks.

A view of the raw materials to be put in the hole.

The hole is all ready for the final steps.

Want to see inside ? It's a lot bigger than it looks.

Here is Mark who was very kind to help (do it all) put the tower base and rebar in.

Mark setting rebar in place.

Um, I had to look busy so I took more pictures.

Katie had to watch too.

More rebar setting.

One funny thing is that Katie really wanted to help and she had seen us putting lots of sand and gravel in the hole. When we were done she decided to help by putting a lot of little handfuls of rocks into the hole. She didn't seem to care when Mark was under those handfuls :).

OK, rebar is done. Looks great.

Here's the "forms" around the hole. The hole looked square to the house until the forms were on. You can see how far off the hole was. The forms may not look it, but they are square to the house.

Here's an inside view of the forms / rebar / tower.

And a view of the end of the day, just before going to the Zoo for father's day (yes, we did all this work in a couple hours on Father's day.

A few days later the concrete arrives.

This is the driver smooshing my trees. I didn't really care though. I was just overjoyed the truck could easily get to the hole.

This is the driver, Cindy, about to pour the concrete.

Had to do some quick work with shovels and getting the stuff in, so I couldn't take pictures during the actual pour, but this is just after the truck drove off but before I finished it. There is extra in the wheelbarrow, but the rest we dumped on the driveway.

All done. It's nice and smoothed out. Man it was tiring.

All wrapped up in plastic. Needs to cure now for a few weeks.

After a few weeks of curing, David & Chris & Mark & Sam were nice enough to come visit over the 4th of July weekend and help put the tower up (and given my ability to climb towers, let's just say they did all the work :).

David starts up the tower.

Mark heads up the tower too.

KT has the most important job, cheerleading. She was confined to the truck bed, but she kept telling the tower crew to be CAREFUL! :)

One of the middle sections going in ...

And another taller section.

Finished putting up the last section.

All done!

I had read about the concrete in bases exploding if the lightning goes through the base, so I insisted we put at least a temporary ground on the tower. Good thing too because that night we had humongous storms with insane lightning. I was very happy :).

That's the end of the tower itself, but here are some of the wireless internet being installed.

Sunflower Prohibited the guy from climbing towers for legal reasons, so they brought out the biggest bucket truck they had. It's good to 40 feet.

A partially installed entrance to the house.

Here's JB aiming the antenna.

All done! Fast internet is finally here!!! Wooo hooo!!!

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