I've been suffering with sub-par internet for the last few years.
The company we have been with for years has old equipment, no spare parts and zero redundancy so when ANY tower goes down, my tower goes down as I'm on the end of the string.
My 2 year contract runs out at end of October so it was time to take care of it.
I do some IT/network related consulting online and my son works from home as a Lead Software Engineer for a gaming company and moves large files regularly so we really need speed and reliability.

We had a site survey done on Monday, Sept 28th and they said we needed 40' for good signal.
The best way to get good line of sight signal is height!
I was searching bookOface marketplace for used towers before they got out of driveway!
Found a freshly taken down 80' Rohn about a hundred miles away, made the deal and picked it up on Tuesday afternoon.

I already had a slab from a mid-70's 76' CB tower but had to dig holes and install new anchors for guy wires.
I picked up a few odds and ends including new galvanized grade 5 bolts/nuts for tower joints and ordered a guy wire mount for the tower.

Over the next week, the parts we had on order arrived and we assembled the tower as 50' with a 10' 1-3/4" pushup mast in the top section.
I made an adapter plate to convert the existing bolt pattern on concrete pad to fit the tower pattern.
We attached guy wires and finished the rest of the make ready work.

On the following Tuesday, Octobert 5th, we put the gin pole on my trusty Kubota and raised the tower into place.
We attached and adjusted the guy wire turnbuckles, finished conduit w/pull string and attached ground wire to tower base.
The company arrived on Friday and installed new radio.
And I have good internet again.

Someone once started a new thread asking if we would pay to post on THF. You just did.

Nice work. Ground the tower and you'll save yourself equipment costs. Put a grounded surge protector on the ethernet cable coming in too.

Very well done!

Did you pour this concrete pad?

Yes Sir.
Back in 1976 in middle of CB radio madness.
That was the base for a 76' foldover tower that had a pair of co-phased vertical stacked 3s and a horizontal AS Big Daddy 5 right below them.

10-4.

What was your handle.

Breadwinner

This brings back some good memories from my youth. We also had a Stack 3 on top of a 50 foot tower. We used a contraption called a Sky Hook that bolted onto the side of the tower that would pivot to swing the antenna over the the mast. Being young and skinny, I got the job of climbing up and setting the antenna and hooking up the wires. I spent many an hour talking skip all over the northern states and Canada in the middle of the night. The farthest away was a guy in Nova Scotia using single sideband.

My Dad did the same back in the 60s. Called it his Dallas cowboys antenna. That was back before all the games were televised on local channels. We set the first stage in concrete 4ft deep. Worked like a charm. He had more guy wires than you have. Just a thought, maybe attach 3 more halfway down for high winds.

Yep. I found out the hard way.

After spending a couple decades working tower sites, I can tell you, that’s no small job. I also fought against lightning damage. I finally came up with a good solution. Use 8’ copper clad ground rods. If you can’t drive them in vertically while pouring water down the hole, bury them horizontally in a shallow trench with a handful of ice cream salt thrown over the entire length of the trench. Use #6 solid copper non stranded wire to ground everything. Use the good brass ground rod clamps to make your connection to the rod(s). Use Polyphaser lightning arresting equipment to protect your equipment. I would use two different Polyphasers to do that, one for the A/C line powering the tower equipment and another for the Ethernet cable. If the setup uses a landline, protect that too.

Your grounding procedure is the same as telco common practices.

Thanks, good to know.

I had a perfectly good ground rod in the ground next to the slab.
I managed to hook it with the backhoe bucket while digging the trench for the conduit and sucked it right out of the ground before I realized it.
I wasn't sure where the old one was so I had already bought a new one.
Driving that 8' sucker in red clay that starts about 8" down was no fun.
First 5-1/2' with TPost driver and last 2-1/2' with 6 pound sledge.

Did you wobble the rod to flare the hole and pour water down the rod? Do that and lift, push down and repeat. With a gallon of water in red clay you should be able to almost get it in by hand. Finish tapping it in with a small sledge.

So Sir...I just drove it like a dog!
I will try it next time this comes up though.
The clay is pretty stiff right now with the drought - the wrong time to be digging holes and driving stuff into the ground around here.