People want those wonderful mobile phones, but they don't want those nasty cell towers in any place where they can be seen.

So there are businesses popping up that will camouflage a cell tower to look like an innocuous object like a tree or a cactus:

http://utilitycamo.com/products/monoelm/

 

The dummy tree idea has been around almost as long as cell towers, but I haven't seen the dummy cactus idea before. Mind you, a large cactus would stick out like a sore thumb here in Wales .

 

I've seen them disguised as Norfolk Pines. Fairly realistic; you have to look closely to see they're actually cell towers.

 

There are some really good ones and some really poor quality ones which I have seen.
Heres one of the cheap ones

A.H.W.

 

The link to the company in my initial post has a tower disguised as a palm tree. The palm fronds can cover the upper antennas and the shedding bark covers the lower row.

 

There is something about antennas that people don't like. Before the flag fell out of favor...several companies would sell antennas that also functioned as flag poles. They had tuned feed points hidden in the base. Some had remote switching capability. And there have been lots of articles on disguising antennas thru the years.....many hams experience this problem.

I have had antenna complaints.......and never had large antennas or large structures.

Is the complaint....just the looks......or they don't want any more being built?

 

We have lots of trees around here that have been disguised as cell towers. The first one I became aware of goes back well over thirty years.

Our county requires that towers over a certain height (and it's not that high at all, may thirty feet or so) have to be disguised. That is what nixed the microwave link that our ISP was going to put up. It would have allowed reasonably high speed service to about a dozen homes (including ours) and the ISP was willing to pay for it even though it was going to take forever to pay for itself -- they saw it as a worthwhile goodwill gesture to the community. The tower was only 30' tall and the HOA gave unanimous approval; the county had already approved the design and the permits had been pulled. The ISP had the tower on site and was ready to begin construction when some official from the county pulled the plug citing the fact that it wasn't disguised as a tree. The fact that no part of the antenna structure was visible from anywhere outside the bounds of our privately owned community and that it had ZERO objections, even from the person who agree to an easement for it to be build a stone's throw from him house, didn't matter. The cost to comply was an additional $200k, so that killed the project.

Interestingly, a couple years later the county wanted to purchase one of the homes in our community and build a 180' tower on the properly; citing cost concerns, they granted themselves a waiver so that the tower didn't have to be disguised in any way. Just one more example of governments not willing to live by the same rules they impose on everyone else.

The homeowners were extremely opposed and, since it violated our HOA covenants, the board disapproved the request. Most of the opposition wasn't to the tower, but rather to the significant increase in traffic on our privately-maintained roads that would result and the concern that the county would start using the home for things like retreats that would further bring increased traffic by nonresidents. For a while it looked like the county was going to exercise imminent domain to grant itself an exception to our covenants -- yet another example of, "the rules don't apply to us" -- but in the end decided that it wasn't worth creating the hostile relationship that result from doing to.