Steven Swift wrote:
But there's the old shortwave listener's aphorism:

"If your antenna stayed up last winter, you didn't put it up high enough."

Way back when, dad put up a tri-band beam on a ten foot tripod atop the
two-story building we lived in. Being a former merchant marine, he
insisted on overdoing *everything*. He reinforced the tripod, he guyed
it nine ways from Sunday, he used thick-wall plumbing pipe as mast,
you name it, he overdid it.

A few weeks after we put it up, his sister died and we went to NOLA for
the funeral. While we were gone, there was a storm here with sustained
winds well over 60 MPH and gusts said to have hit the hundred mark.
Before I tried to use the antenna, we went up to inspect it. There
wasn't a TV antenna still standing as far as the eye could see; several
chimneys were downed, lots of formerly healthy trees and lots of heavy
tree branches.

The sum total of our damage? The beam rotated 15 degrees on the mast.

--
If John McCain gets the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination,
my vote for President will be a write-in for Jiang Zemin.