If you can!

This is kind of a neat aite... they really go out of thier way to hide cell phone towers!

whoa... this FAQ alert is weird huh?

There are a few towers like this up on Monument Hill near Colorado Springs. It wasn't obvious at first with one slightly odd pine tree, but when someone cloned it, they started to stand out a bit.

Here in AZ, they do the same thing with photo-radar. They supposedly have them hidden in some fake cactuses (or cacti depending on your preference) in the median of some roads. I'd rather have cell phone towers.

Speed traps are illegal in California.

Calvin

Speed traps are illegal in California.

And where did this information come from?

Umm... the speed trap that caught me a few months back would tend to make me think otherwise.

well they can't hide a radar mechanism as a tree for example...

Calvin

Boy this sounds safe.. I thought the US gvt is wanting this kind of info taken offline with 9-11 and all...

Wow... I didn't even think of that... They are stricly SPRINT towers and there are about a million of them... So I suppose it would be one serious operation to take down that network, and it would only effect Sprint Customers. For instance - there are 4 or 5 towers in my city alone.

not only would it be one serious operation to "take them all out" who is it really going to hurt? There are other carriers, land lines, etc. The network is so distributed these days it would take serious effort to knock it down.

Calvin

And where did this information come from?

From your buddy Zandr. See this post.

tanstaafl.

Speed traps WERE illegal in california.. There was a law that said that they may not use radars for speed traps if more then 80% of the traffic goes above the speed limit. - BUT last I heard they were modifying this law.
-mark

Some of the reasons for hiding those eyesores involve avoiding city ordinances and actually convincing somebody to let them put them up on their land. They tried to put one of those cell phone towers at the entrance to our neighborhood in GA as a scrub pine.

They offered us something like $10,000 for it over a period of time (4 years?). However, they would get to keep the thing up for 20, and it really wouldn't have looked all that great. I think we would actually have been responsible for the upkeep of the grounds as well.

The proposal was eventually declined. We probably could have gotten 2-3 times as much for the thing, but our homeowner's association didn't need the money. Other subdivisions (it seems that they like dealing with subdivisions) seemed to imply that they got good deals, but there were pretty severe penalties in the contracts for revealing such info.

I don't think they've found anyone else out there to put up their tower for them. Its been about 6 years now and we still have poor coverage in the area.

-Biscuits

Any references to the proposed changes? I'd like to see them.

Calvin

Here in Australia, Speed traps are legal anywhere and must be 'obvious'. There are strict guidelines that they can't be more than a certain distance from the curb; must have a sign indicating a radar is being used and a few other things.
Even so, they are easy to be trapped by.

It's its obvious and marked, then it's not a trap. :-D

Calvin