A couple of miles NW of Dexter, Michigan (and I suppose in many other places I haven’t seen yet), there is a strange object on a utility pole next to the road. The pole is maybe 30 feet tall, and on top is something that vaguely resembles a high-voltage insulator, or a stack of mushroom caps. Except it’s quite a bit bigger than the typical HV insulator: this object is maybe 10 feet tall, and 18 inches in diameter. It’s vertical, colinear with the pole, and doesn’t apear to have any wires/cables connected to it from anywhere but the utility pole that’s holding it up.
Not really. The items in your picture all have some sort of ribbed horizontal projection at their base, and the vertical portion has very flat ribs. On the item I saw, the ribbed segments were more like spherical caps; at their outermost edge, they had a substantial downward slope, maybe 30-40 degrees, similar to the sketch at that Wikipedia page. The gap between each ribbed segment was maybe a foot.
It’s at least a couple of years old, but it’s not present on Google’s Streeview. It might be a few weeks before I can get out that way again; when I do, I’ll snap a few photos and upload it.
Don’t think so, as it didn’t have all those components on it. But I found a picture in your links that caught my eye - this one. What I saw looked similar, except:
-the bowls were maybe two feet in diameter
-they were stacked with maybe a 1-foot gap between them
-they were gray/black
-there were perhaps ten of them, making a stack ten feet high
How times have changed. As a kid they were called air raid sirens. They were tested once a month and scared the crap out of us (it was on a pole across the street from our house). If it went off at any other time other than five minutes after Noon once a month, that meant the bombers and missiles were on their way.
When I was a young-un, we had one about a block away. I always wondered this, even about the scheduled tests. After all, I figured, however evil those Russkies might be, the weren’t dumb, and the scheduled times for those tests was easily knowable. So why not just launch their bombs with suitable timing to hit just as the tests are running? Huh? Huh? Even the Russians could figure that out!
The caption says that one is on North Territorial Road. The one I saw is on Island Lake Road, but going from memory, it looks like that might be the same type that I saw.
So what’s with the funky shape? The PDf file mentions the configuration as a stack of “one to ten omni-direcitonal speaker cells assembled in a vertical column.” The second page shows a photo of a 400-watt speaker driver, and also shows someone installing it into the final assembly. So where does the sound come out? What do the big clamshell things do for it?
