My day job is in Telecoms and has been for near as makes no difference, 40+ years now. For a 5 year period I worked all over Scotland, especially in more rural or remote areas, installing and commissioning Microwave Radio links. Cellular telephony was still a fairly new technology in those days and one job was to put a link into the Cellnet ( which became O2) site on top of Ben Gullipen, fed from Buchlyvie.
As I live not that far from there nowadays, at the turn of the year I took a walk up to the top of the hill to see if there was a photo to be had. I honestly could not recall the view from up there at all as last time I was up I was too busy working and wasn’t taking in the scenery.
The B&W Drone shot on the left shows the radio site, and the link I worked on isn’t actually on one of the towers, it was mounted on a post fitted to the roof of one of the cabins. In the image, if you follow the left leg of the rightmost tower down to where it “meets” with the roof of one of the cabins, the 1.2Metre dish ( now long out of service) was the one we did.
Why isn’t it on a tower?
Well the fact is, its all about maintainability and if you don’t have to be up high on a tower or mast you are best not to be. In a site like Ben Gullipen where snow is an issue links might get encrusted with snow in winter. One man going to site and being able to clear the snow with a brush from ground height saves employing a couple of specially trained riggers to access the mast. Also when there is a fault having the electronics mounted nearer the ground makes exchanging units easy for one man.
But I digress! Having got up to the top of the hill a few weeks ago, it was very very windy. It was still fairly early, the sun was still in the last quarter of the sky and I decided to hang around to see if anything happened at sunset. A couple of people spoke to me while I waited. One seemed to be a bit of a photographer himself and didn’t give that much of a chance of a decent sunset, “the clouds are too low on the west horizon”. I was unsure but having trudged up I saw no harm in waiting. Soon enough the sun started to set and it was “OK” but nothing exceptional and I got a few images . As the sun finally sank below the far hills behind Loch Lomond the temperature dropped markedly.
I didn’t think much else was about to happen so I packed the gear and started to walk back off the top of the hill. Just as I got past the radio site the sky suddenly and dramatically turned red. I wasn’t sure if I could be bothered getting all the gear out again but the colours became spectacular.
I hurriedly got my camera unpacked and hastened to find a place to capture the moment. It was cold and very windy but I am pleased with the shots I got.