One day on my drive home, I saw three towers. One of them had a bunch of blinking white lights, another one had red lights that kind of faded in and out, and the third one, well, it wasn't doing anything. I'm lucky to have a radio engineer for a dad, so Dad: why do some towers blink?
Joe: Well, blinking I would call like the way you described it, "flashing", "white light", or "strobe". All these lights are to aid pilots and air traffic. helicopters, fighter planes, regular jets. So that's the purpose of it.
Jeff: Well that one tower that I saw had red lights that faded in and out, but I even think there's a freestanding tower just north of here that has red and white on top.
Joe: Well red lighting is a thing. It's in the regulations, it specifies red lighting or white lighting, and one of the things like the red lights can be a bulb like this inside of a red housing, could be LED.
Giant Bulbs
Jeff: Where'd you find this bulb? This was not in my studio.
Joe: This bulb is a spare bulb for a tower site. And most of us use the same bulb, same socket, 620 watts. It's a very standard broadcast bulb for a broadcast tower. And a lot of the beacons, they're pretty tall and they'll have one right-side up, and one upside-down. So they'll have two bulbs in the socket. That way, when one bulb burns out, you realize you have a bulb out, but you're still legal with the second bulb.
Jeff: At my house, I don't have any of this kind of bulb anymore [incandescent]. I have, you know, this is a little bit different size, these are LED. Is that similar on towers?
Joe: Yeah. So it is the same. Like an LED assembly for a tower could be kind of flat, and it has, you know, it's set to just do what it needs to do. So in like white light, that's, typically it used to be always strobes. And at KMOX, you remember we had the whole assembly there. and you see the glass bulb, with xenon gas inside.
So those were the old way for that, but the newer ones are all white LED, and they can be little pancake-looking things compared to what the things are now. They can direct that LED light really to help airplanes and have less trouble for people who live in homes or apartment buildings nearby.
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