Located in the recent issue of the Charleston Regional BUSINESS JOURNAL: 

TECHNOLOGY LEAD STORY: Tower power: Local company invents an industry in disguise.

By Tiffany Jonas
Contributing Writer

Sean McLernon’s father was driving down the highway when he had an idea.

“It basically grew out of the need to get cellular coverage while driving down the highway,” says McLernon, now CEO of North Charleston-based STEALTH® Concealment Solutions. “He saw the large signs on the side of the road—petroleum signs, hotel signs, those types—and he started to think, what if they were to put cellular antennas in there? That’s how STEALTH® was born.”

The idea, McLernon says, founded an industry.

Launched in 1992, STEALTH® Concealment Solutions was named one of Charleston’s 2001 Top 10 Emerging Companies by the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce and has won a major industry award for one of its designs.

“We probably do over 350 different kinds of sites per year,” says McLernon. “It really is pretty well disbursed across all the major six to seven carriers.”

STEALTH® works on projects all over the nation as well as locally. Its online photo gallery runs the gamut from church steeples to chimneys and cupolas to a clock tower—all ­disguised cell phone towers configured in either our manufacturing facility on the West Coast, or at its main manufacturing facility in North Charleston.

According to an August 2002 article in Site Management and Technology, more than 500 churches nationwide earn income from housing cellular antennas in their steeples. Wired News reported that during the summer of 2002, the Archbishop’s Council of the Church of England signed a contract to allow all of England’s 16,000 churches to house such antennas inside their spires.

Siting antennas inside church steeples can be controversial. Occasionally, church members and others in the community voice concerns over mixing for-profit business with a site that has a spiritual or holy purpose.

However, late last year STEALTH® received a letter from one of its clients, Jefferson United Methodist Church in Pennsylvania, thanking them for the job they had done on its steeple.

“The steeple has been well received by our entire congregation and the greater community of Jefferson Hills,” wrote Reverend Douglas Heagy. “The material you used to make the steeple has not clashed with the appearance of our nearly 80-year-old church building.”

The company has not done any concealments in Holy City church steeples yet, according to Cindy Wilshart, marketing associate for STEALTH®. “The radio frequency engineers who work for the carriers determine where the concealment is needed geographically,” she says. These areas haven’t yet included churches in their geographic footprints. “So far there has not been a need in the Lowcountry for a steeple application, but that’s not to say it won’t come up in the near future.”

Recently, the company’s flagpole design near I-526 and Ashley River Road has been drawing attention, though McLernon says it is only one of several local projects.

“There are a couple projects that have been rooftop-type concealments in the downtown area,” says McLernon. “Currently we have four or five varied projects underway in and around Charleston. One is a penthouse that goes on top of a roof, looks innocuous and blends in with the building. There’s another very ornate type of balcony that goes on the outside of a building that we’re replicating. It will act as a screen to hide antennas, but you’d never know.”

The projects come with their own challenges. Even existing, tried-and-true designs—like penthouses and flagpoles—can be difficult due to challenges presented by matching a changing environment.

“Getting the measurements, the colors, all the nuances just right so the building owner will accept the concealment and sign off on it is always a challenge. They’re looking for a perfect match,” says McLernon. “We can take a color sample and it will look totally different under the sun. For example, we do glass buildings. For that, we use an acrylic type of substance. As the sun sets and rises in the sky, it throws a different shadow on a glass building. While you may match the color to the glass at one point during the day, it might be off the second half of the day.”

Two of our more creative projects are in development now. “We’re actually simulating an osprey nest, which is pretty cool,” McLernon says. “It’s not like matching brick or siding. It’s a real challenge. That took us quite a bit of time and effort, a couple prototypes. We’re [also] doing a replica of some Roman-style columns, and we had to spin them out of foam, so the signal could get through. They were originally designed to be concrete.”