[Tagging] Masts vs Towers yet again

[Greg Troxel]

Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> writes:

> sent from a phone
>
>> Il giorno 18 apr 2016, alle ore 04:39, John Eldredge <john at jfeldredge.com> ha scritto:
>> 
>> The 808-foot antenna for radio station WSM fits both the tower and mast descriptions we are using. 
>> <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSM_(AM)
>
> IMHO this could be either tagged as mast or as antenna, but hardly as a tower.

I think part of the difficulty in this discussion is that in radio
usage, anything with latticework is called tower.  For example, this is
the standard product in 10-20m antenna supports:

  http://www.rohnnet.com/rohn-45g-tower

I think you would call it mast, but amateur and other radio people call
it tower (en_US).  These are sometimes guyed and sometimes not guyed

The same company makes things they call "masts":

  http://www.rohnnet.com/rohn-telescoping-masts

Again they can be guyed or not.

My understanding is that in en_GB, one says "mobile phone mast" for most
antenna support structures.  In en_US, normal people do not use the word
mast (other than for ships), and if you pointed to either a lattice-type
or a monopole type mast and asked for the term, 99.9% of the poeple
would say "cell tower" or "cell phone tower".  People would think the
monopole type is basically the same thing, less ugly, and that it's
just a detail rather than a fundamentally different thing.


I think the real issue is that we're arguing about a relatively
unimportant detail in the primary key, instead of stepping back to think
about what the real representation issues are.

Certainly "fire tower", "eiffel tower" or anything with rooms are a
totally different thing than Rohn 45 or masts used to support antennas.
I think that's at the root of the disagreement; those with a background
in radio want to use tower for what radio people call towers, and others
(especially en_GB, I think)



In US regulatory language, the term is "antenna support structure".  So
one possibility is to reserve man_made=tower for things that are for
other purposes or really significant (have stairs, ec.), and to use

  man_made=antenna_support

for towers (in the rohn 45 sense) and masts that primarily support
antennas.  And probably also things that fundmanentally are antennas
rather than support them; they are not easy to tell apart and there are
things that are both.

If people want also

  antenna_support:diameter=2m
  antenna_support:type={lattice,monopole}
  antenna_support:lit={no,red,flashing-white}

that seems fine and is likely not too controversial.

The alternative view is to adjust 99% of man_made=tower to
man_made=mast, after beefing up the mast definition to be more explicit
about things that are called tower by radio people.
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