With roots in Australia dating back to 1994, Allfasteners tapped into the U.S. tower market in 2012. The family-owned company initially entered the sector with structural blind bolting but has expanded exponentially, and organically, offering everything from small cell solutions to safety climb systems.
Concealment products, aside from protecting high-cost infrastructure, can also help from an aesthetic perspective, easing municipality concerns by blending technology into everyday surroundings.
Allfasteners continues to evolve the design of its Raptor Radome, one of its premier concealment solutions, with its customers’ needs in mind. Most recently, it added more ventilation to ensure that antennas do not overheat when outside solar radiation couples with integrated 5G radios, increasing the heat inside the canisters.
“In some cases, overheating scenarios are created that shut down or reduce the output of the actual carrier’s equipment,” Bruce Carmichael, Business Development Manager at Allfasteners told Inside Towers. “Allfasteners conducted different thermal analysis studies to come up with the benchmark to relieve that heat, using different venting designs.”
As a result, venting is now an option available on request for the Raptor Radome in units that have integrated radios, or in areas that have potentially higher temperatures.
“The product decisions concerning the Raptor Radome happen through a collaboration of our engineering team, tower owners, and carriers. We collectively discuss the issues at hand and then work towards a solution that addresses the real-life needs,” Carmichael said. “We came up with a way to get the temperature inside the canister equal to the ambient temperature.”
Not only has Allfasteners created venting for the Raptor Radome, but it has also created a vortex system that actively extracts the heat out of the top of the monopole. Air is pulled up through the openings at the baseplate and through the portholes. Directional fins allow the air to rotate through the tower, pulling it up through the creation of a vortex.
About every 30 seconds, the vortex system can change the volume of air inside the canister on a standard 120-foot monopole that is 36 inches in diameter. Additional remediation with high heat loads may be needed in particularly warm areas in the Southeast and Southwest.
The Raptor Radome, which has been on the market for three years, has been largely customized to fit on each tower. Allfasteners is looking at ways to standardize the attachment to existing towers using a universal mounting system and 6 inches of adjustable vertical height.
“We’re working on a universal mounting bracket, which we plan to patent very soon. The mounting bracket will allow us flexibility to adapt to different diameters of towers,” Carmichael said.
Allfasteners’ goal is to drive down the lead times for product orders and remove the need to map the tower. This means that if it has the original manufacturer’s tower drawings, it will be able to adapt to the Raptor Radome more easily. “We want to continue to develop the product to improve the ease of usability so that it is not only easy to access, but also to install,” Carmichael said.
For more information about Allfasteners’ Raptor Radome and other concealment solutions, visit: https://allfasteners.com//concealment-solutions or email [email protected].
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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