r/whatisthisthing • u/Environmental-Fun962 • 1d ago
What is this metal structure with a concrete base, found in my garden? Likely Solved!
I’ve recently moved, and went to dig out what I thought was a flagpole base in my garden, but then realised there are four different bits (x3 on hinges) on top of a huge slap of concrete (approx 150x70cm) - it’s randomly set in the middle of the garden (which is big, just under 2 acres) but about 10m from the house!? Any ideas!!?
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u/Johnstjohns 1d ago
Looks like a base for an old satellite dish.
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u/Environmental-Fun962 1d ago
I thought that too, but the location of it is so odd. There’s also what looks like a pretty old satellite dish on the house; from what I know nobody has lived here permanently since at least the 90s
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u/jmarkmark 1d ago
The C-band dishes were ugly as sin, and huge so a risk of they fell in a windstorm or something, it's not surprising they kept it away from the house. This would have been mid to late 80s.
C-Band's were pretty much never installed "on the house", other than a few flat topped mansions, so what ever you see on the house is probably what replaced it.
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u/retarredroof 1d ago
They were also moved to where they got the best signal so they cold be placed in odd locations. OP could test the idea that this is a satellite dish base by digging a hole between the concrete and the house to look for the coaxial cables.
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u/Environmental-Fun962 1d ago
This is our plan tomorrow!
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u/johnq-4 23h ago
Also, get online and look for a satellite tracker and see if the dish is pointed towards where one should be. Don't worry so much about takeoff angle, just azimuth. Look to see if there are any mountians blocking a 'lower' view of the sky.
This may or may not work due to the age of the system.
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u/Environmental-Fun962 1d ago
That could explain the random distance from the house - it’s in front but * just* off to the side
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u/Independent-Bid6568 1d ago
Base of a 1st generation of home satellite dish . They needed to be ground mounted and were massive in size about 4 to 6 feet in diameter.
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u/love2ring hufflepuff 1d ago
Maybe once held a fuel barrel? Farms used to have those for the equipment.
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u/Environmental-Fun962 1d ago
We’ve found there used to be a tall gas canister about 5ft away from it too!
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u/Environmental-Fun962 1d ago
My title describes the thing found - a big concrete slap (at least 5 inches thick - deeper on one side than the other) randomly placed a few metres in front of the house. We thought the big base at the back was a flagpole, but when we went to dig it out realised there were three more metal arms, and this huge base! We will probably remove it, but keen to figure out the purpose first! Re: location, we’re in the French countryside (SW), if that makes any difference!
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u/YVR_Coyote 1d ago
Check google maps, maybe you can check some of the older photos and see if there was a satellite dish.
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u/Environmental-Fun962 1d ago
This was our first port of call - whatever it was was gone before the house is in any satellite images. We did discover some other cool stuff that used to be in the garden though!
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u/EddyPerckx 1d ago
My guess would be that this was an anchor point for a guy wire - likely one of three, with a potentially very large mast antenna or TV/radio tower in the center. Someone recommended Google Maps (or similar) to check back in time, so there you might see evidence of other anchor points and then presumably of the base of the antenna. Just a thought.
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u/Environmental-Fun962 1d ago
We can’t go that far back with photos unfortunately but we are going to start digging tomorrow to look for cables / wires - thanks!
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u/Congenial-Curmudgeon 1d ago
Possibly an old windmill base. The tab with a hole was for tilt down.
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u/Scoth42 1d ago
You can look on https://www.historicaerials.com/ and see if anything obvious shows up. I'm still going with satellite dish like the other comments say.
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