Life has so many imbalances, you must be well balanced and find your center of gravity when climbing great heights. Regardless of your safety gears, shit happens up there just like in life: an engineer hustling as a start up owner.
Business wise, I prefer to stay safe on the ground when those calls for my Haulage services rolls in. Be that as it may, things don't usually work out as planned and some days might roll into weeks without a service call. Hence, I have a backup plan, a friend of my full time into Telecommunications and equipment always rings me up.
I was about to climb this mast when I took this shot, it was a high RF(Radio Frequency) mast/tower been shared by three network providers in the post covid days. From where that mast is to my city is about 720KM or more, I was far away from my home and climbing a network mast that are mostly laden with bee hives, wasps nest and nests of birds of prey.
Linesman job, or Radio Frequency Technician job isn't what I do, but I have a friend who is a NOC engineer and wanted me back to my actual Field so I do go for long trip for such part time projects. As a college student, I was superb in all my Telecommunication courses, I love radio waves and signal readings, calculating waveguides and all. I like reading and solving problems about Satellites and signal transmission, as a graduate, I found myself on another path- Data Science and Softwares.
So in my friends quest to get mW back on the line, he always calls me for some site maintenance part time jobs as a linesman, which I seldom take up considering the distance apart and I have no car anymore . Each NOC engineer is entitled to a linesman otherwise called a mast climber, it makes the work faster when there are dozens of faults to be rectified.
As a non-practising Telecommunications engineer(I had started a small Haulage services after a few years of working with a software firm). Seeing things like this mast seems strange to me, even though i have climb some in my undergraduate days, yet I found myself learning again. We learn everyday, especially if its what you one time majored in, but you drifted away due to life imbalances.
Climbing a mast is the work of a Rigger as they are often called in my Country aside lines man. This my buddy, the NOC engineer happens to be the First Field Engineer at some of these site up North. You can refer to the role as the lead Network Engineer in a team. So anytime something comes up and I travel up north, I stay by to spend some days with him and his family and to attend to other matters till my time is up and I get back to the city. Usually its just couple of weeks and not something long, so I spend every work hours going to fields and network sites to work with him and to gain some tiny experience as I'll call it.
Climbing a mast/tower isn't as hard as it looks, installing the transmitters and responders is the monumental task. You could go up and down half a dozen times if you don't get your installations or troubleshootings right.
Furthermore, you have more things ti worry about besides the installations; Thunder with lightening, bird attacks and Bees attack are the risky part of these challenge. This could lead to loss of life when a rigger encounters any of this and falls off to the ground.
Hopefully, someday I'll find some of the refresher courses I have gotten useful in my own space. Maybe just someday, in my present world, I will find use for it, that is: If I decide to go back to my field of study full-time.