What the first site conversation covers, and how a budget turns into a height.
Every project on this site started with the same conversation, long before any steel was drawn. Where the tower is planned and how the site is reached comes first — whether a vehicle can get there at all, or materials have to be carried in, changes the whole cost structure before height is even discussed. Terrain, water access, and the height of the surrounding canopy follow, because a tower is sized against the forest it stands in, not against a number picked in the abstract.
Structure follows from use: how many people will stand on the deck at once, whether the platform needs to serve young people and teenagers, what accessibility the site requires, and whether intermediate platforms make sense along the climb — all of that shapes the frame before a single member is sized. Then the practical questions that decide whether a schedule holds: connectivity on site, lodging and food for a four-to-six person crew for the build, and soil conditions at the foundation. Self-supporting towers need a proper SPT survey; guyed towers can often be resolved with a site visit alone.
The tower's steel section stays close to constant up to about 30 metres regardless of the final height chosen within that range — what actually changes between a 10 metre option and a 20 metre one is the number of guy cables and anchorages along the body of the tower, not the frame itself. That's also why extending a tower's height later, after it's built, is never just a matter of adding steel on top: the platforms — heavy, metal-decked structures — have to come down and go back up at the new height, alongside the new stays and anchors. It's a real cost, worth planning for at the first conversation rather than discovering at the second.
Because the modules in the standard range are already sized against commercial steel lengths, a custom height outside that range means re-running the structural design from scratch — which is why, wherever a site's needs fit inside the standard options, that's the faster and more economical path to the same view.