Here are a couple of pictures from a somewhat special antenna placement on Malta. In the midst of a ruin, one of the Maltese network operators has installed, rather ad-hoc, a base station. At first I thought that a ruin might not be the best place for a BTS but on the other hand, I don't think that ruin is going anywhere in the next decade and is unlikely to be demolished either. And the rent for the network operator is probably quite cheap as well. The second picture shows how well the antenna is hidden. The black color makes the antenna blend in with the black background perfectly so most people will likely never notice it despite it being only a meter or so away. On the third picture I used a different setting on the camera and the support of the flash to make the antenna more visible. That's how you see it once you've become aware of it. An interesting installation and probably one of the reasons why both 2G and 3G coverage is excellent on the island.
Earlier I guess the cities or something like that required that antennas are camouflaged to disappear in the environment here in Finland. I guess that has been relaxed here since most of the recent installations are very obvious and visible. Like security cameras, you get used to cellular base station antennas after a while and completely ignore them. Sometimes I stop to look at some of the older installations and try to imagine how much more extra work it would be to do all installations like that. Not too much I guess, mostly a matter of choosing the paint color correctly.
The cables in your photo are pretty obvious. It would be really difficult to find that intrusive if they had painted the cable, too. Shouldn’t be that hard.
Hm, I start to wonder if the antenna was camouflaged in the first place to counter vandalism!? You can’t vandalize what you don’t see…
Ugly cables, who needs them. Thought this was supposed to be wireless network! 😉 Sand coloured paint would be cheap, but the other cabling isn’t particularly well blended either. My favourites are the antennas disguised as trees in the US.