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Ogallala-Nebraska
Photos of the Ogallala Nebraska site by Jim Hebbeln.

Ogallala-NE-AmTower American Tower Corporation's ID sign on the building door.
Ogallala-NE-leg The Ogallala site is located in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, which are not much more than sand dunes with a covering of prairie grass. Sand does not make for a solid foundation. Therefore, additional diagonal legs (toes?) apparently were attached to the main structure to broaden the tower's base into the sand, especially after the tower was heightened.
Ogallala-NE-SE A view looking northwest. Based upon the square holes in the original platform, it appears that only the horns toward Chappell (west/left) were located up in the tower extension, while the horns facing east (right) toward the Sutherland, NE site remained mounted in the original platform.
Ogallala-NE-SW tower This view is from the southwest looking up the tower.
Ogallala-NE-SW This shows the tower looking toward the northeast. I believe that it is the original tower, but a vertical extension was added, probably about 1980, when a newer Chappell, NE tower was built 7 miles north of Julesburg, CO. The additional height was required to achieve line-of-sight to Chappell. The original route to Julesburg was

This album has 5 items in total    |    Album was updated 9/6/04 7:00 PM 


Info:
August 04, 2004

Ogallala, NE was an auxiliary radio repeater site on the original transcontinental radio relay system. It is located about five miles north and three miles east of the town of Ogallala, Nebraska. It is 2 miles south of Kingsley Dam placed across the North Platte River, which produced the resulting 23-mile Lake McConaughy in the Sand Hills of western Nebraska. These pictures were taken July 8, 2004.

Ogallala is now owned by American Tower Corporation and is their Site # NE-88993. (I cannot find this tower number on the AmericanTower website, nor in their Landmark Series spreadsheet of AT&T towers.) The antennas all have been removed and only the tower and building remain.

A ?neighbor? who lived northwest of the tower on the hill overlooking Lake McConaughy stopped me on the road, hoping that I was going to say the ugly thing was going to be dismantled. They had no respect for its historical significance, nor its precedence, as it had been there 250% longer than the twenty years they had lived there. I tried to draw a parallel between this radio route for television, and the transcontinental railroad, but got nowhere. (I'm sure they would like to get rid of the railroad, too, as 125 trains/day pass over the Union Pacific rails through Ogallala.)