, covered in ice Where
terrain and road access allows,
mountaintop sites are very attractive for non-AM
broadcast stations and others, because it increases the stations'
height above average terrain, allowing them to reach further by avoiding obstructions on the ground, and by increasing the
radio horizon. With a clearer
line of sight in both cases, more signal can be received. While the same is true of a very tall tower, like
Paris’
Eiffel Tower, such towers are expensive, dangerous, and difficult to access the top of, and may collect and drop large amounts of ice in winter, or even
collapse in a severe ice storm and/or high winds. Multiple small towers also allow stations to have backup facilities co-located on each other's towers for
redundancy. Satellite antenna farms are usually located at remote locations, far away from urban development, especially high rise buildings or airplane flight paths, to avoid and minimize disruption to transmission and reception, and so as to not be an eyesore. Although most radio and TV stations are in fierce competition with each other in their broadcast markets, they will often locate their broadcasting antennas very near each other, and in some cases, will even share land or towers with each other, in the interests of space, land availability, and the cost of putting a transmission building on top of a mountain.
In the United States complex and Telehouse, Germany's largest satellite communications facility in
Raisting,
Bavaria,
Germany Most
metropolitan areas have at least one antenna farm, such as:
Dedham/
Needham in the metro Boston market,
Mount Wilson in
greater Los Angeles (seen at right),
Sweat Mountain in
metro Atlanta,
Farnsworth Peak for the
Salt Lake Valley,
Riverview in
Tampa, Florida,
Baltimore's
Television Hill and
Slide Mountain (
Mount Rose ski area) in the
Reno/
Tahoe area. Some cities instead have combined many stations onto one tower, often through
diplexers into just one or two antennas, such as atop the
Empire State Building in
New York, the landmark
Sutro Tower of
San Francisco, or the huge
Miami Gardens tower serving the
Miami and Fort Lauderdale region.
Cleveland, Ohio has its antenna farm in the suburb of
Parma, Ohio due to Parma's high elevation. In central
Oklahoma City most of the city's media outlets transmitter and tower facilities are located between the
Kilpatrick Turnpike to the south and
Interstate 44 to the north, Broadway Extension to the west and
Interstate 35 to the east with Britton Road being the central thoroughfare. In addition, all three network affiliates and one of the 3 major radio groups have their studio facilities located within the
Oklahoma City tower farm. In the
Appalachian Mountains of the Eastern United States,
Poor Mountain serves most of the FM and TV stations in the
Roanoke/
Lynchburg market.
Holston Mountain in upper East Tennessee is home to most of the FM and TV stations in the Tri-Cities (
Bristol, Virginia-
Kingsport, Tennessee-
Johnson City, Tennessee) DMA. Other examples are
Signal Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee,
Sharp's Ridge in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Paris Mountain in
Greenville, South Carolina. Other examples of co-located towers on mountain peaks in the United States are on
Red Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama;
Mount Wilson near Los Angeles; the
Sutro Tower in Clarendon Heights near
Mount Sutro in San Francisco;
Lookout Mountain, Colorado near Denver; Cedar Hill between Dallas and Fort Worth;
South Mountain Park near Phoenix; Nelson Peak near Salt Lake City;
Sandia Crest near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Probably the most famous broadcast antenna farm of all is the
World Trade Center Tower One, on which many of the New York City television and several FM stations had their antennas. All were lost when Twin Towers One and Two collapsed after the
September 11 attacks in 2001. Most of those stations reverted to broadcasting from their previous home, 200 feet lower, on the
Empire State Building. ==Objections==