Thanks! Can I suggest that you might enjoy following my blog regularly? In addition to utility poles, I have also discussed this year: Samuel Johnson's feud with James Macpherson, a fraudulent poet; the panicked history of England in 1533 after Henry VIII's mistress got pregnant; the Slaughter electric needle injector; how plutonium is used to power medical devices; equivalents of "Joe Blow" in Turkish and Hebrew. Also a lot of other stuff more or less random.

https://blog.plover.com/

Why do you denigrate your own work so often, though? Most of the time, when someone posts your articles, you reply "does this guy ever shut up" or "this post sucks".

I think it's funny.

I am all over that! Thank you for sharing.

I realize this may be a silly question, but how do I follow your blog? Is there an email subscription? Do I need some app to access your RSS feed?

I feel like this should be easier to solve than it is. (:

In Firefox, you can just visit https://blog.plover.com/index.atom or https://blog.plover.com/index.rss and the browser will present you with a button that says “subscribe to this feed using live bookmarks” which will add it to your Firefox bookmarks, and it will look just like any other bookmark folder, except that it will always contain the dozen or so most recent posts.

Probably other browsers have something similar, either built-in or supplied as a plugin.

You'll need an RSS reader, such as newsblur.com

Something that completely fascinates me are cell towers/equipment. They are everywhere, yet I know almost nothing about them and rarely get to see them up close. Even less often (pretty much never) meet anyone who work on the equipment. I imagine each base station is basically a mini datacenter. I was at Mammoth Mountain recently for the first time and got to see the cell towers at the top of one of the lifts up close and got some good pictures.

I’ll try to write up a blog post on it. The newer stuff I’m out of touch with, but I’ve worked on a good chunk of the gear you commonly see still.

The one thing I miss about working for a major national telco was access to the internal newsgroups where you'd get deep discussions triggered by someone's random question on things.

The FCC's Antenna Structure Registration website [1] is a good place to start.

Crown Castle [2] owns a fair amount of cell towers across the US. If it's a freestanding tower, they often also own the land where it is situated on.

[1] http://wireless.fcc.gov/antenna/index.htm?job=home

[2] http://www.crowncastle.com/

I would absolutely love a big writeup on how they're set up and what the components are, as well as all the real-estate stuff that certainly surrounds them. I'm also noticing a lot of new towers that look like big cylinders on a pole, sort of like a TACAN so I often wonder what's up with that.

I do know that the traditional ones are triangle shaped such that they each form the intersection of a hexagon tessellation (hence the cell in cellphone) such that you have three towers pointed into every hexagonal cell.

The cell companies are actually moving away from the large towers as 5g service is deployed in favor of microcells.

http://www.steelintheair.com/Blog/2017/04/top-10-things-the-...

They can be built into decorative lighting poles such that you would really have to pay attention to notice them.

How does that work in rural areas? Microcells all the way down the highway at regular intervals?

Microcells are good for carrying lots of traffic from lots of mobile stations. In rural areas, coverage at the lowest cost per square mile is more important. Also, farmers aren't always near the highway, so microcells on the highway would not work well for them.

One of my favourites: All you need to know about whiteboard markers[1].

[1] https://medium.com/graphicfacilitation/all-you-need-to-know-...

I completely agree, and Tedium is probably what you're looking for: https://tedium.co

Maybe not what parent is looking for, but looks right up my alley. Never heard of it until now, bookmarked for later. Thanks for the link.

Tom Scott's youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBa659QWEk1AI4Tg--mrJ2A

Further to that, I love that he doesn't provide answers to all of the things he's wondering about.

A friend and I have a podcast at https://www.youtube.com/fungineering

I don't know, maybe this sort of thing was better before Wikipedia? Now an hour or two of reading can answer pretty much all of this person's questions.