Telecommunication Towers for the Military Industry

ALLTEC has built a reputation of solving some of the world’s most challenging lightning, grounding, and power quality problems using its comprehensive facility approach. For this reason, International Towers contacted ALLTEC to help facilitate its site protection for one of their most complicated and unique communication tower projects.

The Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command (MAGTFTC) OC3 Remote Mountain Top Tower Build for the US Marine Corps at Twenty-Nine Palms, California was initially a challenging task. However, by combining their dynamic expertise, International Towers and Alltec achieved total project success without any hesitation.

International Towers has been an integral part of the communications industry for more than 30 years, and they are responsible for tower development around the world. The Twenty-Nine Palms project involved a remote mountain-top tower built for the OC3 Backbone Infrastructure Upgrade positioned at a very secluded and demanding desert location.

The project consisted of a tower installation at five remote mountain-top sites and was the initial effort as part of a larger multi-phase IT infrastructure project at Twenty-nine Palms.

The Twenty-Nine Palms IT expansion project will extend and augment the existing range infrastructure to seven sites. By expanding and upgrading these sites, a redundant IP network will be established to allow existing and future data traffic to support Marine Corp training across the range.

The upgrade at five remote sites provided sufficient platforms to mount radio antennas and microwave dishes, to provide Line of Sight (LOS) communications between connecting microwave repeaters, and to have vertical clearance of existing structures.

Without sufficient platforms, the system described will not function. NSWC Corona FT31 provided the engineering design, oversight, and vendor selection for this effort.

CACI/ITI were the successful bidders in this unique design-build opportunity; they developed the proprietary design and solutions to meet the needs of the MAGTFTC. ALLTEC provided the grounding design and materials for this unique assignment.

In many cases, constraints such as air transportation costs, a lack of utilities other than solar power, and the use of only military specs could have inhibited the job completion. However, ALLTEC and International Towers formed a dynamic task force for Twenty-Nine Palms IT Infrastructure Expansion project and completed the project successfully.

originally posted 09-2009