Building a transmitter over the weekend

This weekend we built a 12m antenna tower and another 6m pole with base and housing for batteries. This is to provide real highspeed Internet to the Altos del Maria project near Sora in Panama. People around here, including myself, have been suffering from slow and not very reliable Internet service for quite some time. Thanks to a cooperation with PaNetMa a better solution will be available by tomorrow.

Last week on Wednesday we got the permission from the owner of a strip of land on a nearby hill to build the tower. Then we quickly purchased the material and Luis and his brothers built the antenna tower while others dug holes for the foundation. On Saturday we had the basics done and on Sunday we erected the tower and poured the concrete for the foundation. Today the base for the wind turbine was poured and we started to build the housing for the batteries. By tomorrow this will be finished and sometime during the day of tomorrow PaNetMa will install their equipment.

I’m really excited to see this happening so quickly as I’ve just begun to teach an online training class and fast and reliable Internet is very important for that. With some luck I can use the new connection on Wednesday.

The pictures link to a set of 81 photos with all the details of this achievement. Building a transmitter on the top of a mountain with independent power generation in just three days is certainly a good job - don’t you think?