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Ham Radio Tower

Reading List: Up the tower

Steve Morris has taken all of his hard-earned lessons and put them all in one comprehensive book. It’s over 220 pages of facts, techniques, hardware and lots of answers to your tower construction questions.

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Towers and pricing

One of the more common questions is what does a tower cost me to put up? As many of you know this can vary quite a bit.  We are going to approach this from a single vendor perspective.  What this means is I am going to take what it would cost to buy a commercially available tower from Texas Towers and put it in the air.

Disclaimers
1.I am not endorsing Texas Towers nor am I affiliated with them. They are one of the few tower manufacturers who publish prices.
2.Consumable costs will vary depending on where you are, time of year, state regulations, and maybe even the cycle of the moon.
3.This is geared toward small deployments.
4.Pricing is based upon the information I had available at time of this writing.

  • Texas towers makes a self supporting 100 foot tower (Model HD8-100).  This tower is rated to support 7.4 square feet of load in 110MPH winds. Cost $4,409.
  • The base which goes in the ground costs $225
  • Freight costs vary
  • Concrete. The base for this tower requires 6 cubic yards of concrete. Pricing near me is $95 per yard plus a $30 delivery fee with a 3 yard minimum.
  • If you are doing the 100 foot tower a small 80-100 foot crane can put this up.  The tower weighs around 500 pounds so a small crane is sufficient.  In my area a crane this size would be around $400 for a half day.  Since it’s not a huge crane it doesn’t require special permits in indiana
  • Engineering Fees for the base run around $1000.

So total cost for the tower: $5734 plus freight.

There are some other factors to consider. Permitting, labor to assemble tower, standoffs, etc. But this gives you a good ballpark estimate.