Above the clouds on Oklahoma's tallest structure in 2023

​My name is Sam Slavens and I am a broadcast tower climber. I work for one of just a few companies that specialize in tall tower work and I travel the nation to perform structural maintenance and modifications on TV Towers, some of the tallest structures ever built. The story below is how I got here.

I was born in 1988 and grew up playing outside and, as a child before the internet, my favorite thing to do was climb to the tops of trees, so I've never had a fear of heights. Fast forward to 2013 I'm 25 years old and nearing the end of my contract with the SC National Guard around the same time we're returning from a deployment to Kosovo. My unit hosted a re-integration event with trade schools, employers, colleges, and universities to offer opportunities after the deployment orders ended. Having already decided I wanted to work in the trades, once I spotted a display about wind turbines I was in Southern California six weeks later learning about wind turbines and the principles of electrical generation and transmission. While I was there, several employers came to visit and offer jobs and I decided then to work on cell towers instead of wind turbines.

Having already accepted a job during the trade school, two weeks after the school I started working for Bluestream doing line and antenna work, installing antennas and radios on towers for AT&T as part of the LTE buildout. After Bluestream I would work for several more companies and go on to conduct post-construction audits, build out networks for T-Mobile and US Cellular, and do structural work on cell towers before starting broadcast work at the beginning of the tower work phase of the repack in 2019.

I stumbled into broadcast work at the perfect time through no planning or foresight of my own. I was in the right place at the right time, and had conducted myself such that when a former coworker got on a broadcast crew himself and they were looking for hands, he called me. 

The repack was a decade long process of spectrum reallocation that culminated in several years of essentially all the TV stations in the country having their transmission lines and antennas replaced so 5G phones could occupy that bandwidth. This created a far above normal demand for tall tower services so tall tower service companies expanded and that gave some people the opportunity to get in and get broadcast experience. Now that the repack is over, the workforce has returned to its normal levels, which is maybe 100-150 people doing the big work on tall towers in the country. This is why it is now extremely difficult for someone to get into broadcast without prior broadcast experience.

I had always enjoyed capturing the views from towers and had an eye for catching good angles, and over the years phone cameras, GoPro, and drone technology has advanced greatly giving me great tools to capture some moments from my life. I used to just post on social media for free cloud based storage and so my family and friends would know I was alive and working, now it's insane to me the level of interest I sometimes get when I post videos but I hope to share more from this world of mine and bring y'all along for the ride.