I live in Western Washington, and we have very tall (130ft+) Douglas fir everywhere. I have a few on my property and I’m coming up with a plan to hang a node relatively high up.
I have two options to do this safely. I can either use an arborist sling to shoot a rope maybe 60ft or so up, and then pull a heavier rope with the node up. Or, I could drop some fishing line and a weight from my drone and do the same thing, except possibly even higher up.
Has anyone done something like this? Am I overthinking this, or missing something?
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Planning to also put a solar charger with it?
Yep, that’s the plan! This is what I’m going to put up there, ideally.
I’m not smart so I climbed the tree as high as I could, strapped a fiberglass pole with a pulley to the trunk for extra height, then hoisted the node up via the pulley.
It “worked” but I didn’t fully clear the canopy so the solar charging was not great. Controlling the position/angle of solar cells is difficult when hoisting a node
Do you think this case would help with the positioning?
That’s a really cool idea. I just had two small solar cells on one side of the case which made it very directional. I’d toyed with the idea of building a little “housing” that was fixed to the pole where it could only enter in the correct orientation but I got lazy/impatient and just ran it up.
Seems like that case would help a lot. My first worry was series vs parallel, but that is helpfully called out in the README (
with these three panels in parallel) and if they were in series it’d likely be WAY too much voltage (depending on the charge controller).As long as the mounting location gets decent sun from at least one angle for a good part of the day, that looks like an awesome solution. I’m bookmarking it for future builds, so thanks : )
out of curiosity do they tend to have stable enough branches to where things hung on them can be expected to stay put for several years?
I would go with drone just because it would be more accurate and get you right where you want it. I haven’t tried it but I have given it thought.
I used a drone to hang a leader line for a high rope for my nephews swing. I’m talking like 60-70ft up. It was an amazing swing with a massive pendulum effect.
Highly recommend using a drone for this, just don’t get it stuck up there.
Edit: at my last apartment, I did put a node about 35 feet up a pine tree. I used a 10ft PVC pipe, half inch, and lashed it to the center trunk so it stuck out the top a few feet to get solar. Worked really well.
This is exactly how we put up amateur radio antennas.
Some things to consider:
- how is it powered
- how do you get it down
- how do you stop it from killing someone on the ground when it eventually comes down
- how will foliage growth affect the range
- squirrels and birds will likely take an interest
- waterproofing
