I'm thinkin' Nate just committed to attending 6Y9 this year so he can "inspect" the existing infrastructure...
Heh... I "retired" from RF work... kinda. I was President of the Colorado Repeater Association an Amateur Radio club with a lot of VHF and UHF gear on top of some of the mountains along the Front Range here... a couple of years ago.
http://www.w0cra.org/
A "site survey" is what the industry would call this. Professionals would have the location of the nearest towers, and plot the RF path for the repeater back to one of them via computer, these days. In the "good ol' days", you'd bring a topo map and a compass, and aim the antenna for peak signal strength.
Non-professionals like me would show up, look at the stuff available, and maybe try to hack something together. As long as the cellular company said it was ok. The problem is that I won't put the few FCC licenses I hold at risk by placing something on-air without written permission from the frequency holder that they're okaying it.
E-mails are flying (no pun intended) right now internally in the Amateur Radio group since one of our more popular radio repeater systems on an 11,440' MSL peak (known by us for decades as "Squaw Mountain", political correctness has taken over and most maps now say "Chief Mountain") has decided to go Tango Uniform, and it's the middle of winter. It doesn't even key up. And they always choose the dead of winter to die, per Murphy's Law.
The two mile or so USFS 4WD road is usually completely impassible this time of year, two or three feet deep in snow at the light spots. I've seen remnants of winter snow on the road up there in July, some years. Its nice to be up there in July. It's miserable now.
Last time this happened, I coordinated with a guy who owned a snowmobile to take our tech the last two miles up the Forest Service access road. The tech fell off the back, luckily into deep powder, and only his pride was hurt. (And also lucky the 50 lb VHF power amplifier in his backpack which probably gave him a CG problem to start with, on the back of the snowmobile, wasn't injured in the fall either.) I was sitting at the bottom of the USFS road in my Jeep, monitoring all this "fun" on my hand-held radio and thinking about how ****ed his wife would be if he ended up at a hospital that night, or worse... how much she'd sue us for if he had serious injuries. The joys of being Club President. White hair, mostly.
I still sit on the Board of that organization and am trying not to volunteer for anything other than "decision-making" these days. I'm not a very good BoD member, but all outgoing Presidents are offered a Board seat.
This old fire tower up there used to be the highest continually manned USFS facility, decades ago:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=4c6deea9-1d41-4550-9880-c2a1b600fedd
It's about 40 feet higher than the radio building (which is the old stone house the firewatch person lived in, last lived in sometime around the early 1980's...) and on the national historic register now, I believe. Boarded up, just sits there, looking out over Denver. Great view.
Anyway... it was either Amateur Radio or Flying when I got back into Aviation, and there wasn't anywhere near time enough to do both. Not and stay current/safe in Aviation, anyway. My time had to be spent at the airport, instead.
One local Amateur has his PP-Helicopter rating but doesn't fly, and he has commercial radio interests at some of the mountain-top radio sites. A couple of years ago, he managed to turn that into a JetRanger ride to a site to fix the broken stuff that made money... with his old CFI, but none of the Amateur gear makes a dime. Most clubs run on a shoestring budget.
http://www.rmham.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=53
The site in those photos, is Mt. Thorodin -- which is about 1000' MSL lower than Squaw, and 10-12 miles north, as the crow flies. Via roads, it'd take three hours minimum in summer weather, with awful 4WD roads at both ends to get between them. Probably closer to 4 hours.
http://www.rmham.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=53
American Tower built the building and facility up there a couple decades ago. Prior to that, the mountain was covered with all sorts of little make-shift buildings and towers, all lugged up there by dedicated souls with 4WD vehicles in the summertime. One club had coordinated the COANG to fly their tower and a small building/hut up there underneath a Chinook for "training purposes" and goodwill to the community, but the USFS cancelled all land leases when AT built the building, and requires everyone to be in their building now, at exorbitant rates. The few Amateur organizations still up there are "grandfathered" and their gear is stuffed into what used to be a kitchen in the building. (Whoever thought a kitchen was necessary up there, was a little daft, back during the original construction of the building.)
RF toys and radios are a fun hobby if you have a good 4WD vehicle, and some radio know-how, and a lot of summer-time weekends with nothing to do. My summer-time weekends have to be spent flying 79M to keep the hourly cost down!
These days, I'd be more inclined to help out Colorado CAP and their Communications folks work on these types of mountain-top systems than Amateurs, mostly because CAP has a budget and a mission for their systems. Not saying the Amateur side isn't fun, but I'm putting my hat in the ring with the groups I'm involved with in Aviation as part of our Aviation community before spending time at the Amateur sites. Just a priorities thing.
