I worked at a television station years back that was designed in such a way that the lights going up the tower were powered by the separate phases of three phase AC with the one at the top powered from all three combined. This was pretty normal but what the engineer had done was rotate them at every level so that if a phase was dropped you could count the lights and quickly see from a distance that the power wasn't right. 4 lights was good, 3 meant you dropped a phase, and so on. I thought it was a pretty clever way of keeping light on all sides of the tower while being able to tell from a distance that a phase was out.
This is best practice for anyone who uses three phase power.
A machine shop should connect 1/3 of their lights to each phase so it is immediately obvious if a phase gets dropped. Lots of equipment will suffer on two of three phases but with lower performance or even damage.
> This is best practice for anyone who uses three phase power.
No, it’s not. It’s a neat trick that visually reveals when the utility drops a phase, but there are better ways to handle avoiding equipment damage.
Best practice is to use phase monitoring relays that can de-energize a motor when a phase is dropped/reversed to prevent damage. The trip time is adjustable and it’s more reliable than manually hitting an e-stop. It also won’t let a motor with incorrect phasing start up either. You see phase loss relays on a lot of compressor motors and other large motors.
Clever! I know I talked to the folks at Masterclock in St. Louis recently about one of their clock displays; they intentionally default the separators to flash if the clock is not synced to NTP, and then they go solid once the connection is established.
It's a quick way to know if something is down, using context clues that are already there to begin with!
> Joe: [...] So whenever there's a project on the tower, it's not unusual to see the guys in some kind of a, what do they call those?
> Jeff: A full ghillie suit? Or I don't know what they're called.
If you see someone up in a tall tower wearing a ghillie suit [0]... that sounds like time to call emergency services while avoiding their line-of-sight. :p
Haha, yes. For some reason, ghillie suit was the only thing I could think of at the time. I think they wear basic tyvek suits while doing paint work, not sure if they need full hazmat (maybe if the tower has lead paint?).
One interesting fact I learned in a different discussion is that when LED lights are used for obstruction lighting, the FAA has standards that require infrared emitters to make them visible to night vision goggles, since unlike incandescent bulbs, some LED's can be invisible to NVG's.
the towers in my area all switched to LED recently. the slow, glowing blink of the incandescent ones probably isn't as visible as the modern ones, but I do dearly miss seeing it out my window.
These beacons are also great for navigation. Aeronautical charts usually show the color/pattern of the light. You can use those as points to triangulate your position.
You have brought back to me memories from 30+ years ago, playing Microsoft flight simulator, trying to triangulate my position using VOR beacons as quickly as possible before my aircraft had moved so far on that I was no longer anywhere near my triangulated position, hah!
Slightly off topic: typically, lights of neighboring towers blink asynchronously. But sometimes they are synchronized. Very satisfying. Anyone knows how this works? My best guess is e.g. DCF77. Thoughts?
I believe it's usually GPS/GNS (they all receive the time via GPS independently, and flash at predetermined times). The FAA requires synchronization for many classes of obstruction because it makes it clear that you're looking at obstruction lights rather than e.g. brake lights or traffic lights on the ground.
Could they also use power grid sync? Not sure as I haven't talked to anyone in wind power, but grid sync would be pretty close to 1 Hz at least in the US.
Building a product that would sync at 1 Hz via GPS that works in the US and other countries with 50 Hz power would be a little easier than syncing to grid phase though.
Definitely GPS. Other methods have been used in the past--I remember reading operating reports from a wind farm nearly 20 years ago that slowly brought all its lights in line with each other over several months--but these days you can buy mainstream lighting with the GNSS receiver built in from a number of suppliers. They make it easy.
For wind farm use most also have an external input for ADLS triggers, though that usually also requires a separate controller and communications connection to manage the ADLS signals.
The flashing red lights are L-864 type. The requirements are 20 to 40 flashes per minute (FPM), and typically 30 FPM is used.
My observation is not that they are sometimes synchronised, but some subset of the towers are synchronised (this was my observation in Melbourne AU). Upon asking reddit, it appears that it is the FAA-preferred option that all lights are synchronised:
https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...
Driving through a massive wind farm at night is a trip since they all blink in unison. Having them all independently would look interesting but could rapidly descend into madness:
Yeah, I've seen it with windfarms. Always wondered why do they need to blink at the same time. The scale of the blink is pretty jarring at night (but also awe-some, in the same way any big enough infrastructure project inspires a kind of awe).
Wind farms have a certain amount of nimbyism because they "spoil the natural landscape." (So do regular farms -- nothing natural about grain silos or row crops, but that's a side topic...) Anyways, having that many towers blink in unison across that big a landscape is a weird effect when you first see it. I think there's an argument that if they blinked independently it would feel more natural in a way.
But since the blinking is all FAA requirements, I assume it's to help identify all the individual towers from the air. I suppose if they were all blinking independently, it would be a predator-trying-to-focus-on-a-single-zebra-in-the-herd problem, except in this case the predator is a pilot trying not to crash into a turbine.
Sure would emit more subtle 'part of the landscape' vibes though.
(Which I guess is exactly what you don't want when you're flying above them. Sigh.)
It's so pilots see the entire wind farm as a single entity and can interpret what they see and understand the extent of the wind farm easily. There is a pretty good study you can read on this:
As to community impact, radar-activated lighting is an approach that is being used in places this is a concern. It allows the lights to remain off unless there is a plane within the envelope that requires the lights to activate. It's expensive though.
If they don't sync to a common clock source, they won't stay in sync for long. Probably not even for a few minutes or so.
You'd get the same phenomenon that you see when operating turn signals in traffic. They seem to weave "in and out" of sync. The frequency at which that happens is the beat frequency, i.e. the difference between the two blinking frequencies.
A cheapo 20ppm quartz watch crystal definitely doesn't drift by a second every few minutes, but it will over about about half a day at maximum error. A 5ppm one (still sub one Euro) will keep a second about every two days. A 0.5ppm TCXO can be had for about 15 Euros from Mouser and that gets you two weeks.
If you have shared line power you can just use that and everything will be locked in sync forever.
If you don't want to use that or radio, and you are outside, you could try to be really clever am sync your flash phases to a specific position of the sun. This is what the Long Now clock does. It'll be a different time each day, but it'll be the same for all units, within a small tolerance.
Well, yeah. I was sort of assuming that you won't use a TCXO or even just a cheapo quartz crystal, because it doesn't make a lot of sense: You've now thrown money at something that will relatively quickly desync anyway.
I mean, sure, the TCXO will mean that you only start seeing a phase difference between the two after weeks instead of minutes, but what's the point of that? I you want them to be at the same phase, you'll need to sync them at some point, and you do that by using a common clock source.
So either you shell out some effort for a real solution (power line is nice, and also qualifies as a common clock source as I've predicated), or you don't. And if you don't, there's no point in using a precise-ish clock at all, and you'll likely end up with very quick desyncing.
It's a bit larger than a 555, but it should keep you within a small handful of microseconds per day until the aging effects start to add up which make getting more than a millisecond a year dicey, even if the thing doesn't die on you: https://www.ipgp.fr/~crawford/2017_EuroOBS_workshop/Resource...
Wouldn't the mains frequency be a common clock source, if nothing else?
But presumably these lights at least have battery backup, given the obvious risks in case all of them were to fail at the same time due to a grid issue.
Yeah, the mains frequency qualifies, if you explicitly use that.
(Doesn't solve the problem if you want them to be in sync phase-wise, i.e. blink at the same time or similar, but at least they won't drift apart, which was what this is about.)
You could still sync with that signal because it's not perfect.
For example, say you have a scheme where a period longer than the last one is symbol A, about the same period is B and shorter is C. You will get a random-ish sequence of symbols.
If you have an algorithm that, say, resets the timer to zero whenever a certain symbol sequence is detected, you can eventually get back in sync. With some care you can make sure you only sync when the sequence happens and the light has only been off for a short period to avoid excessively long off periods or truncated on periods.
Then you just need to have a local oscillator good enough to do that timing analysis and that can maintain sync between these symbol occurrences.
You could do it on the tiniest micro. Once you've counted the zero crossing detector, these days you might save 3 to 5 whole dollars over a GPS receiver on your very expensive ICAO compliant lamp and also ruled out using DC into the bargain! And theoretically it desyncs when the grid is too stable for days on end (and you just get BBBBB or ABABAB for millions of cycles)!
In terms of what is actually used, they do often use GPS and many of them have MODBUS or similar data connections which presumably wire into the wind turbine's telemetry somehow for fault detection.
Related: Some wind turbines apparently only turn on their position lights when there's any aviation traffic nearby (as detected by either local transponder interrogators (possibly ADS-B receivers?) or radar)!
Radar, called Aircraft Detection Lighting Systems (ADLS). The requirements are summarized in the FAA Advisory Circular covering aviation marking and lighting.
In the past year or two they have also added a quick periodic flash of white light for when visibility is low; like a camera flash that happens every few seconds. I think it was added this spring but don't quite remember.
Strictly speaking they should be unnecessary because there are published minimum safe altitudes for every air space over land. But some aircraft must be able to “See and avoid”
Blinking attracts attention which is the real purpose. I'd assume based on how we detect motion more easily, these add a bit of "motion" to attract our attention
I know. But when I was programming LEDs for my single board computer, I found that blinking the LEDs used a lot less power. If the blink rate was fast enough, your eye did not distinguish that from the LED being on 100% of the time.
I don't know if battery powered devices generally use that trick or not.
all dimmable LEDs use blinking, but interesting case for your suggestion for an even more efficient use of a "steady" LED. what blink frequency did you use to keep it from being visible to the eye? did it not dim the overall brightness to a meter? early LEDs were atrocious with their slow blink rates that quickly scanning across them could see it, but even more noticeable if you pointed your camera at them. now, they blink incredibly fast, fast enough even for some slo-mo to not strobe.
Oh, I just hooked it up to a square wave generator and an oscilloscope. I just played with the square wave frequency. It was 50 years ago, I don't recall values and such.
I worked at a television station years back that was designed in such a way that the lights going up the tower were powered by the separate phases of three phase AC with the one at the top powered from all three combined. This was pretty normal but what the engineer had done was rotate them at every level so that if a phase was dropped you could count the lights and quickly see from a distance that the power wasn't right. 4 lights was good, 3 meant you dropped a phase, and so on. I thought it was a pretty clever way of keeping light on all sides of the tower while being able to tell from a distance that a phase was out.
This is best practice for anyone who uses three phase power.
A machine shop should connect 1/3 of their lights to each phase so it is immediately obvious if a phase gets dropped. Lots of equipment will suffer on two of three phases but with lower performance or even damage.
> This is best practice for anyone who uses three phase power.
No, it’s not. It’s a neat trick that visually reveals when the utility drops a phase, but there are better ways to handle avoiding equipment damage.
Best practice is to use phase monitoring relays that can de-energize a motor when a phase is dropped/reversed to prevent damage. The trip time is adjustable and it’s more reliable than manually hitting an e-stop. It also won’t let a motor with incorrect phasing start up either. You see phase loss relays on a lot of compressor motors and other large motors.
Here’s a flyer for an Eaton product: https://www.eaton.com/content/dam/eaton/products/industrialc...
Clever! I know I talked to the folks at Masterclock in St. Louis recently about one of their clock displays; they intentionally default the separators to flash if the clock is not synced to NTP, and then they go solid once the connection is established.
It's a quick way to know if something is down, using context clues that are already there to begin with!
Fascinating
Phascinating
I couldn't help myself, downvote at will.
> Joe: [...] So whenever there's a project on the tower, it's not unusual to see the guys in some kind of a, what do they call those?
> Jeff: A full ghillie suit? Or I don't know what they're called.
If you see someone up in a tall tower wearing a ghillie suit [0]... that sounds like time to call emergency services while avoiding their line-of-sight. :p
(Perhaps they meant "Hazmat" [1])
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghillie_suit
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazmat_suit
Haha, yes. For some reason, ghillie suit was the only thing I could think of at the time. I think they wear basic tyvek suits while doing paint work, not sure if they need full hazmat (maybe if the tower has lead paint?).
I can’t imagine why they’d need a hazmat suit either. It’s probably just protection from the cold.
FAA details the marking and lighting requirements here: https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/advisory_circulars/...
One interesting fact I learned in a different discussion is that when LED lights are used for obstruction lighting, the FAA has standards that require infrared emitters to make them visible to night vision goggles, since unlike incandescent bulbs, some LED's can be invisible to NVG's.
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/airports/engineering...
the towers in my area all switched to LED recently. the slow, glowing blink of the incandescent ones probably isn't as visible as the modern ones, but I do dearly miss seeing it out my window.
These beacons are also great for navigation. Aeronautical charts usually show the color/pattern of the light. You can use those as points to triangulate your position.
You have brought back to me memories from 30+ years ago, playing Microsoft flight simulator, trying to triangulate my position using VOR beacons as quickly as possible before my aircraft had moved so far on that I was no longer anywhere near my triangulated position, hah!
IIRC, light houses are marked on charts similarly. The lights have different patterns, maybe color too?? Maybe not on aeronautical charts though.
Slightly off topic: typically, lights of neighboring towers blink asynchronously. But sometimes they are synchronized. Very satisfying. Anyone knows how this works? My best guess is e.g. DCF77. Thoughts?
I believe it's usually GPS/GNS (they all receive the time via GPS independently, and flash at predetermined times). The FAA requires synchronization for many classes of obstruction because it makes it clear that you're looking at obstruction lights rather than e.g. brake lights or traffic lights on the ground.
Could they also use power grid sync? Not sure as I haven't talked to anyone in wind power, but grid sync would be pretty close to 1 Hz at least in the US.
Building a product that would sync at 1 Hz via GPS that works in the US and other countries with 50 Hz power would be a little easier than syncing to grid phase though.
Definitely GPS. Other methods have been used in the past--I remember reading operating reports from a wind farm nearly 20 years ago that slowly brought all its lights in line with each other over several months--but these days you can buy mainstream lighting with the GNSS receiver built in from a number of suppliers. They make it easy.
For wind farm use most also have an external input for ADLS triggers, though that usually also requires a separate controller and communications connection to manage the ADLS signals.
The flashing red lights are L-864 type. The requirements are 20 to 40 flashes per minute (FPM), and typically 30 FPM is used.
Hmm... maybe I could build a 1pps GPSDO based on light flashes from nearby towers, then. No need for my own GPS antenna!
My observation is not that they are sometimes synchronised, but some subset of the towers are synchronised (this was my observation in Melbourne AU). Upon asking reddit, it appears that it is the FAA-preferred option that all lights are synchronised: https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...
I’ve driven through wind farms where the blinking tower lights are synchronized. Highly distracting.
Driving through a massive wind farm at night is a trip since they all blink in unison. Having them all independently would look interesting but could rapidly descend into madness:
https://archive.org/details/bigclive_20230516
When it's on purpose it's typically done through GPS driven clocks. This is how wind farms manage it, where all towers are required to blink together.
Yeah, I've seen it with windfarms. Always wondered why do they need to blink at the same time. The scale of the blink is pretty jarring at night (but also awe-some, in the same way any big enough infrastructure project inspires a kind of awe).
Wind farms have a certain amount of nimbyism because they "spoil the natural landscape." (So do regular farms -- nothing natural about grain silos or row crops, but that's a side topic...) Anyways, having that many towers blink in unison across that big a landscape is a weird effect when you first see it. I think there's an argument that if they blinked independently it would feel more natural in a way.
But since the blinking is all FAA requirements, I assume it's to help identify all the individual towers from the air. I suppose if they were all blinking independently, it would be a predator-trying-to-focus-on-a-single-zebra-in-the-herd problem, except in this case the predator is a pilot trying not to crash into a turbine.
Sure would emit more subtle 'part of the landscape' vibes though.
(Which I guess is exactly what you don't want when you're flying above them. Sigh.)
It's so pilots see the entire wind farm as a single entity and can interpret what they see and understand the extent of the wind farm easily. There is a pretty good study you can read on this:
https://www.airporttech.tc.faa.gov/DesktopModules/EasyDNNNew...
As to community impact, radar-activated lighting is an approach that is being used in places this is a concern. It allows the lights to remain off unless there is a plane within the envelope that requires the lights to activate. It's expensive though.
Does it have to be radar? Can it use ADS-B?
The FAA document says "sensor-based" but every installation I have seen in the US uses radar.
> Always wondered why do they need to blink at the same time.
presumably this makes it more striking, and thus easier to notice and avoid
One option - Maybe the blinking time is set to a INDEPENDENT? accurate time piece - ie Blink on the change of a second
That's what DCF77 is. Or GPS.
It's probably just a side effect of them being powered on at the same time or not?
If they don't sync to a common clock source, they won't stay in sync for long. Probably not even for a few minutes or so.
You'd get the same phenomenon that you see when operating turn signals in traffic. They seem to weave "in and out" of sync. The frequency at which that happens is the beat frequency, i.e. the difference between the two blinking frequencies.
A cheapo 20ppm quartz watch crystal definitely doesn't drift by a second every few minutes, but it will over about about half a day at maximum error. A 5ppm one (still sub one Euro) will keep a second about every two days. A 0.5ppm TCXO can be had for about 15 Euros from Mouser and that gets you two weeks.
If you have shared line power you can just use that and everything will be locked in sync forever.
If you don't want to use that or radio, and you are outside, you could try to be really clever am sync your flash phases to a specific position of the sun. This is what the Long Now clock does. It'll be a different time each day, but it'll be the same for all units, within a small tolerance.
Well, yeah. I was sort of assuming that you won't use a TCXO or even just a cheapo quartz crystal, because it doesn't make a lot of sense: You've now thrown money at something that will relatively quickly desync anyway.
I mean, sure, the TCXO will mean that you only start seeing a phase difference between the two after weeks instead of minutes, but what's the point of that? I you want them to be at the same phase, you'll need to sync them at some point, and you do that by using a common clock source.
So either you shell out some effort for a real solution (power line is nice, and also qualifies as a common clock source as I've predicated), or you don't. And if you don't, there's no point in using a precise-ish clock at all, and you'll likely end up with very quick desyncing.
Well yes, obviously, but I'm just being a internet pedantic about "a few minutes".
And you are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct anyway.
There's got to be some rubidium frequency standard that's a drop-in replacement for a 555 timer ;)
A chip scale atomic clock (with a handy 1Hz output) can be yours for barely over five thousand euros and half that if you buy 250 of them. https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/csac-sa65
It's a bit larger than a 555, but it should keep you within a small handful of microseconds per day until the aging effects start to add up which make getting more than a millisecond a year dicey, even if the thing doesn't die on you: https://www.ipgp.fr/~crawford/2017_EuroOBS_workshop/Resource...
GNSS (GPS) is the typical standard used.
Wouldn't the mains frequency be a common clock source, if nothing else?
But presumably these lights at least have battery backup, given the obvious risks in case all of them were to fail at the same time due to a grid issue.
Yeah, the mains frequency qualifies, if you explicitly use that.
(Doesn't solve the problem if you want them to be in sync phase-wise, i.e. blink at the same time or similar, but at least they won't drift apart, which was what this is about.)
You could still sync with that signal because it's not perfect.
For example, say you have a scheme where a period longer than the last one is symbol A, about the same period is B and shorter is C. You will get a random-ish sequence of symbols.
If you have an algorithm that, say, resets the timer to zero whenever a certain symbol sequence is detected, you can eventually get back in sync. With some care you can make sure you only sync when the sequence happens and the light has only been off for a short period to avoid excessively long off periods or truncated on periods.
Then you just need to have a local oscillator good enough to do that timing analysis and that can maintain sync between these symbol occurrences.
You could do it on the tiniest micro. Once you've counted the zero crossing detector, these days you might save 3 to 5 whole dollars over a GPS receiver on your very expensive ICAO compliant lamp and also ruled out using DC into the bargain! And theoretically it desyncs when the grid is too stable for days on end (and you just get BBBBB or ABABAB for millions of cycles)!
In terms of what is actually used, they do often use GPS and many of them have MODBUS or similar data connections which presumably wire into the wind turbine's telemetry somehow for fault detection.
It's not just radio towers. I've seen aircraft warning lights on tall buildings, particularly those near airports.
see https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-E...
Related: Some wind turbines apparently only turn on their position lights when there's any aviation traffic nearby (as detected by either local transponder interrogators (possibly ADS-B receivers?) or radar)!
Radar, called Aircraft Detection Lighting Systems (ADLS). The requirements are summarized in the FAA Advisory Circular covering aviation marking and lighting.
As far as I understand, non-US systems don’t always use (primary) radar.
In the past year or two they have also added a quick periodic flash of white light for when visibility is low; like a camera flash that happens every few seconds. I think it was added this spring but don't quite remember.
Never seen a blinking light on a tower in Norway. Why the difference between countries, can’t be that huge difference risk if some don’t have them?
Strictly speaking they should be unnecessary because there are published minimum safe altitudes for every air space over land. But some aircraft must be able to “See and avoid”
Blinking the lights also helps prevent bird deaths - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towerkill
Why do some radio towers NOT blink? Is the better question.
Their height. Below a certain height, lights are not required
This blog post has a really verbose format.
TLDR; White lights are used during the daytime, red lights at night (less annoying), towers under 200 feet don't need blinking lights.
It's a transcript of the video at the top.
Wow that wasn't clear to me either, thanks for pointing it out
Yes, reading transcripts is a terrible way of ingesting information in my opinion.
Then go watch the video? What are you asking for here?
But at least you can scan and read through it instead of having to sit through an entire video :)
and thank you for doing it, at least!
next, you'll be expected to turn that into an outline, index cards, and then a full term paper lest you be ridiculed for your work on the internet!
Blinking uses less power.
Blinking attracts attention which is the real purpose. I'd assume based on how we detect motion more easily, these add a bit of "motion" to attract our attention
I know. But when I was programming LEDs for my single board computer, I found that blinking the LEDs used a lot less power. If the blink rate was fast enough, your eye did not distinguish that from the LED being on 100% of the time.
I don't know if battery powered devices generally use that trick or not.
all dimmable LEDs use blinking, but interesting case for your suggestion for an even more efficient use of a "steady" LED. what blink frequency did you use to keep it from being visible to the eye? did it not dim the overall brightness to a meter? early LEDs were atrocious with their slow blink rates that quickly scanning across them could see it, but even more noticeable if you pointed your camera at them. now, they blink incredibly fast, fast enough even for some slo-mo to not strobe.
Oh, I just hooked it up to a square wave generator and an oscilloscope. I just played with the square wave frequency. It was 50 years ago, I don't recall values and such.
To clean their eyes?
muuuuch better article, lol
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/what-happens-when-you...
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Here is one nursing its young.
https://www.howitworksdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/M...
That's some crazy sexual dimorphism.