Can anyone identify or suggest what kind of antenna this is? It’s at the summit of Burg DM/BW-058.
Full shot of the tower with the unknown antenna about 5/8th up from the bottom.
Detailed view.
Are you sure that’s an antenna… and not lightning protection - or something against electrostatic problems?
73 Armin
Is it maybe some sort of counterpoise ?
Andy
MM7MOX
I really don’t know Armin. It could be something like that and that’s why I’m asking.
Such a ring has already raised questions here in other forums… someone has figured it out.
The ring was installed because of the risk of side lightning impact!
73 Armin
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The place is quite secure. I’ve seen plenty of compounds with CCTV and normal some form of smart motion detection on the images to trigger the alarms. We used to do it by comparing the motion vectors you got when MPEG encoding the image. If something was moving across the image you could track the motion vectors and then highlight what was moving without needing any “AI” to determine if it was a man or dog or rats etc. That was in 2002! But this place had trembler swicthes on the wires above the chain link fencing.
4 stacked horizontal wires and trembler switches. There were lots and lots of switches on each horizontal wire around the compound.
Close up of a switch.
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Magic! The wisdom of crowds holds true for once. 
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One wonders if in a parallel forum members of a certain German Agency are exchanging recent photographs from a Top Secret Location and asking “can anyone identify this unusual character who took loads of close up photographs and then used a covert radio?” 
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It is hardly a top secret site… almost as busy as Piccadilly Circus! We met several people who cycled to the top, myself and Paul M0SNA just drove there as we collected 3x 10pt summits that day. We also bumped into Jarek SP9MA as he emerged from the woods behind the mast. And we bumped into him again on DM/BW-046-Plettenberg later that afternoon!
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Artistic licence (and a warped sense of humour)
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An antenna would certainly be isolated from the concrete mast. And use thicker elements. And there are no coaxial.
Like Armin, I think it’s about dissipating static electricity, like St. Elmo’s fire.
73 Chris
Wikipedia
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It’s perfectly possible for the supports to the right length such that they are open circuit to RF on the ring part. There are cables visible too. However, the view in Armin’s picture adds detail missing in my own photo making its purpose more clear. I’ve never seen anything like this before but there again, I can’t think of any concrete supported antenna arrays in the UK that are based in a forest the way this was as normally in the UK the trees get felled around the antenna support or never existed.
UK concrete supports are rare and looked more like this one. No trees, no lightening protection part way up the construction
Sutton Common (near G/SP-004) (c) 1976 BT Heritage [TCB417/E 65942]
15 years back with no “Hogs Horns” and many dishes. There may well be lightening protection on the lower level supports but it’s there to support all the small dishes rather than just provide safety. With so much of the UK now using fibre, I’d suspect that is quite devoid of dishes now. (c) Dave Smethurst
(Geograph)
I’m thinking it’s the proximity of the trees that makes side strikes a possibility.
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In Germany there are several classes of lightning protection. This depends on the exposure and the location.
For some applications, isolated lightning protection is required… and the lightning protection must of course be close to the antenna. If the mast is also supposed to carry antennas in the middle, then such lightning protection becomes necessary.
I believe that the topic is becoming more important due to climate change.
73 Armin
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Certainly that when I’ve been in Europe, the lightening storms seem a lot more impressive/bigger than in the UK. This is normally simply to do with the fact Central Europe is much, much hotter than the UK and there is more energy to drive the storms. (I keep telling people Edinburgh is further North than Moscow).
Now we have left the EU we wont be getting any of these big European storms! Just like we don’t get nice cheeses and can’t buy easily from small EU companies any more! 
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You can’t have it all… the blessings of Brexit and the good weather
73 Armin
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I’d have thought you’d recognise that Andy - it’s the antenna for an Interocitor
There may well be Kathermann tubes with an Indium complex of plus four inside the building in the compound but that doesn’t look like any part of an Interocitor that I’ve seen!
Perhaps it’s from an Interocitor with Volterator? I’ve seen what goes in a standard Interocitor
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