It's abandoned radio station in Brovary, Ukraine, I've been there several times. There were two antennas — 180 m and 270 m with 100 and 150 kwt transmitters (later up to 250 kwt). Until 1988 they were used for radio jamming (BBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle), later for radio broadcasting [1]
AFAIK you could get serious burns [2][3] even when antenna was not powered any more. In this case it works just like huge receiving antenna, getting kilowatts of RF energy directly from atmosphere. Before the thunderstorm ropes holding the antenna literally glowed due to corona discharge effect.
A few years ago both antennas were demolished [4][5]
Regarding "AFAIK you could get serious burns [2][3] even when antenna was not powered any more", does it mean I can get "free" electricity from "thin air"? Did someone try this already?
You sure can. The normal fair weather voltage gradient in the atmosphere is around 100V per metre. When there are close thunderstorms this increases. Unfortunately for energy collection air is quite insulative. That's also fortunate in that we don't get shocks all the time just from standing around in an environment where your head is 200V different than your feet.
Popular Science once ran an article that showed how to build an electrostatic motor that ran off the atmospheric electricity you could get with something like a wire used as a kite string.
Most tall towers are aggressively grounded. You would need a tower insulated from the ground. A tower used as an element for a low frequency antenna for instance. I strongly suspect that those large black interlocking rings are used as a spark gap for lightning protection in the absence of a solid ground.
Once you were on the tower you wouldn't notice anything. You would have to get between the ungrounded tower and ground.
The interlocking rings are an Austin Transformer [1]. It's the only way to feed electricity to the aircraft warning beacons on the tower without frying the power supply for the light bulbs.
AFAIK you could get serious burns [2][3] even when antenna was not powered any more. In this case it works just like huge receiving antenna, getting kilowatts of RF energy directly from atmosphere. Before the thunderstorm ropes holding the antenna literally glowed due to corona discharge effect.
A few years ago both antennas were demolished [4][5]
[1] http://vk.cc/4LQeGa (wiki, Ukrainian)
[2] http://io.ua/20405915p
[3] http://io.ua/20405932p
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6NgzzFrCv4
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn6sLpDS0Ks