North
Chelmsford Smoke Stack #1 |
Description |
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Located at 71, 73, and 75 Princeton Street off of Rt 3A in N. Chelmsford is this smoke stack which has a Cingular (Cellular One) antenna array on the top. It's been here for many years and is not far from the N. Chelmsford Water tower and the Rt 40 and Rt 3 interchange. These stacks (along with the water tower) are visible (best when the foliage is gone) from Route 3 between Drum Hill and the Rt 40 exits looking to the North East of the highway. This site is also well documented on Pete Ravanis' cell tower website as well (see the links page). |
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A close up of the antenna array for Cingular. You can see on the right side a microwave backhaul dish used for the MTSO relay (back a few years this was the most inexpensive way to backhaul the data to the switching office instead of leasing many T1 lines from Bell Atlantic (their biggest wireless competitor at the time). Today, it's cheaper to run fiber from Verizon or a CLEC than it it to use microwave relays. |
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The base house for Cingular. You can see the GPS antenna mounted on the right roof line side of the building. |
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The sign on the door with the CELLULAR
ONE sticker partially ripped off. I guess thy never put a Cingular sticker
on this or it fell off. |
North
Chelmsford Smoke Stack #2 |
Description |
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Located across Rt 3A from the previous smoke stack is another smoke stack. The address on this building says 51 Middlesex Street. This is an Cingular array (top most) and a T-Mobile array (below it). The T-Mobile array is camouflaged to match the brick shade of the smoke stack. Again, this site is also well documented on Pete Ravanis' cell tower website as well (see the links page). He states that the T-Mobile (then VoiceStream) antenna array was added the week of February 12, 2001. |
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A close up look at both the arrays. Unfortunately I tried to locate the base equipment buildings for these two arrays but the wires run into the mill building instead of to a base building that is accessible from the outside. |
North Chelmsford Water Tower |
Sprint PCS Temporary Portable Mobile Unit |
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Located on Freeman Lake near the center of N. Chelmsford is this water tower. I got lucky when I scouted out this tower as they are currently renovating the water tower, and they made Sprint PCS remove their antenna's from the tower temporarily while the work is conducted. You can see in this photo that the antenna mounting brackets are still installed at the top roof line. They installed a portable mobile unit to the east of this tower with a temporary mast for Sprint PCS. |
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With the water tower to the left, you can see the temporary masting (which is about 1/2 the height of the water tower). |
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The mobile base unit. I was quite ecstatic to see one of these as the last time I saw one was up at Laconia NH bike week last year (for U.S. Cellular). You can see that it's simply a trailer with all the equipment on it. They reran the power and data cabling underground over to this unit. Just to the left in front of the wheels you can see the power and data cables coming out of the ground. |
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The sectorized array. It's not set
for 120 degree separation as the water tower is obstructing it's view
of due west to Route 3. |
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The back side of the trailer mobile
unit. You can see the GPS antenna on the masting. |
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Two angles of the BTS unit, plus
backup power racks. |
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Again, the back end view of the unit.
The fencing is temporary as well, and from the looks of it, it's been
sitting like this for a little while. |
