Electricity Pylons Are Transmitting Radio Signals You Can Use

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:01]Who doesn't love an electricity pylon?

[00:00:03]If you're not a member of the pylon appreciation society, then you should be. They're big, they're beautiful, their glass insulators shine in the sun, and they really are a sight to see if you catch them at the right angle.

[00:00:16]This one has an addition, however.

[00:00:18]Equipment designed not to support the transmission of electricity over cables to support our lives, but over the air to support our social lives. At a glance, you might not notice it, but at ground level, the addition is hard to ignore. It's a Vodafone cellular site.

[00:00:34]More and more pylons have been fitted with mobile phone infrastructure in more recent times, but it's not really anything new. It's been going on for almost 30 years. Vodafone struck a deal with the National Grid in February 1997, which gave them access to 21,000 electricity pylons in mostly rural areas. A 12-month trial started the year before in 1996 and was deemed a success.

[00:00:57]It came about after mobile phone users struggled to get adequate signal in certain areas due to the lack of phone masts, especially within undulating landscape. I know that in 1997, Orange were also experimenting with electricity pylons to mount mobile phone infrastructure, too. Pylon installations increased the options available to Vodafone and other networks and were a much less visually intrusive choice than standalone phone masts. Now, you might be thinking that sounds ridiculous.

[00:01:24]Electricity pylons are much bigger than most dedicated mobile phone masts, but you have to remember that in the late were up in arms over the erection of phone masts because of the nonsensical fear that they caused things like cancer. These controversies led to hundreds of campaign groups being set up who were all against mobile phone masts.

[00:01:44]These controversies also meant that phone companies began disguising their infrastructure as things like trees, a much more costly method, and we all know how costs are passed on to the customer.

[00:01:55]Installing mobile phone infrastructure on electricity pylons didn't stop everyone from moaning, however.

[00:02:02]Vodafone were very quickly accused of seeking an unfair advantage from the National Grid agreement, which left some landowners thousands of pounds out of pocket when equipment was installed on pylons on their land. Pylons were erected under the Electricity Act, which didn't give rights to utilize them for other purposes. That was until companies like Vodafone struck their deals. For a video on how fiber optic communications were carried over pylons, see the link in the description below.

[00:02:29]The Country Landowners Association dismissed as derisory rents as low as £800 per year being offered to landowners by Vodafone where it had the right to use existing National Grid pylons. This was compared with a minimum of between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds per year offered by phone companies who erected new masts on greenfield sites.

[00:02:48]In the late 1990s, rents for new masts were as high as 4 and 1/2 thousand pounds per year.

[00:02:55]This pylon is off Out of the Woods Pool Road in Stockport near the Hydro, the first community owned hydroelectric scheme in Greater Manchester. The cellular installation has been here since around the end of 2001. It was installed as a macro cell, which was served by another high-powered cell site somewhere. Where that was, I don't know.

[00:03:13]All my sources didn't yield any information, but I'd hazard a well-educated guess at either Sunley Tower or St. James's Tower in Manchester city center. You can see a fenced compound at the bottom of the pylon, which contains all the transceiver units and cabinets for things like main electric and possibly an incoming fiber feed. Further up the pylon are the panel antennas, which radiate the signal out to phones in the area. And at the top is a microwave link that points towards the city of Manchester, to the tower that fed this macro cell. More on this soon because I'm almost certain it's now redundant.

[00:03:46]The views from up here really highlight the need for cell towers in the local area as we become more and more dependent on our phones and fast internet speeds. This pylon setup sits amongst its own and its competitors.

[00:03:58]Another pylon mounted system can be seen nearby. This is a three EE setup. If I zoom out, you can see the British Gas Tower over in Lower Bredbury on the left, which is home to another three EE setup, and the Welkin Mill Vodafone setup installed on the old chimney to the right.

[00:04:17]>> [music] [music] >> Looking at the very top of the screen in this view, you can see a tower nestled amongst the trees on Werneth Low.

[00:04:34]There's Vodafone and EE equipment on this one.

[00:04:37]We can move in to take a closer look whilst we're on the subject.

[00:04:44]In the center of this view, just beyond our pylon, you can see an EE tower in Bredbury. And to the left, you'll see the sister blocks of Brecon, Conway, and Ludlow Towers in Brinnington. The right-hand tower is Ludlow, home to an EE setup.

[00:04:59]Let's zoom in and take a closer look at the Bredbury Tower and the blocks in Brinnington.

[00:05:13]Beyond the mixed insulators of this pylon, you can see three more sister blocks of Southay, Castleton, and Fitzgerald Courts over in Hooley Green.

[00:05:21]Castleton and Fitzgerald both have Vodafone systems on their rooftops.

[00:05:25]Again, using video editing magic, we can take a much closer look.

[00:05:36]>> [music] >> The large block in the far distance is Oldham Civic Centre, a radio marvel in its own right, used for a multitude of different things.

[00:05:53]By the way, these little devices on the pylons' wires are also interesting.

[00:05:57]They're Stockbridge dampers, and they're designed to stop unwanted wind-induced oscillations in the wires, which can lead to galloping, which in turn can cause damage. If you want to see how similar devices are used on radio transmitter sites, then I'll leave a link in the description to a video I made on the subject.

[00:06:14]So, back to our pylon. On the ground is a fenced equipment compound. Most of this equipment is usually found in cabinets at the bottom of street masts and on lattice towers themselves. Why it's not mounted on the pylon with the antennas isn't clear.

[00:06:28]This is the sort of configuration you can usually expect to see.

[00:06:32]It's never a good idea to get too close to these places and certainly not a smart move to enter them, either. There are high voltages here from numerous sources.

[00:06:42]Now, when it comes to broadcast infrastructure and other antennas, I'm reasonably confident in identifying them correctly. But when it comes to cellular infrastructure, to say I'm a novice is too kind. So, I've reached out to Peter Clarke, who is ridiculously knowledgeable on cellular infrastructure to give me some top-line detail on what we're looking at here. Peter has his own YouTube channel, which I'll link in the description, and you need to go over there and take a look at his work because what he doesn't know about this stuff isn't worth knowing. In this rack, you can see nine radio units. The top three are ERS 4415 radios for 2100 MHz.

[00:07:17]The middle three are ERS 2212 radios for 900 MHz. And the bottom three are ERS 2260 radios for 800 and 900 MHz. They're made by Ericsson, and Peter tells me they're likely arranged vertically in sectors. So, the left three form sector one, the middle three form sector two, and the right three form sector three.

[00:07:37]This arrangement becomes clearer as we look at the antennas on the pylon. As you can see, the coaxial feeders exit the ground and travel through this trunking up the pylon to the antennas.

[00:07:47]There are six antennas on the pylon, but only three sectors.

[00:07:54]The eagle-eyed amongst you may notice the darker, older antennas, which actually have their coaxial feeder cables cut and hanging down.

[00:08:03]Peter tells me that these are redundant hooked-two antennas. The newer Vodafone antennas are clearly more modern.

[00:08:14]Near the top, you can see a microwave link that I think points to the city, but I can't tell if this is in use or not. It looks older than the rest of the modern equipment here, and I can't find any evidence in my various sources that indicate that the microwave link is still in place here. So, I'd guess that this site is now more than likely fed fiber cable buried in the ground. So, that's a look at an interesting Vodafone pylon mounted cell site. It's always fascinating to get in there with the zoom lenses and get a much closer look, a view you don't get to see every day.

[00:08:44]If you like my transmitter tours, there's a full playlist in the description, which you can binge until your heart's content.

[00:09:03]>> [music] [music]