Due to the limited beam width of these lights, a light box called a strobe head had to be mounted on each leg of the tower at the height of each light. This means that if you have a 900' tower, the FAA may dictate that you have a tier of lights at 300', 600', and the top 900'. This equates to a total of nine flash head units, one for each leg in the three levels.
If you look at a tall tower on Earth and you can count the height of a light box or strobe, you can determine the height of the tower with a fair degree of accuracy. The highlight light only flashes in white mode, not in red mode, and has three flashing intensities: day mode, twilight mode and night mode. Day mode is the brightest, Twilight mode is in the middle, and Night mode is the darkest.
Also, you can see the red incandescent lighthouse at night at my feet; it's the same light in yesterday's picture. This particular tower has white day lights and red night lights on it, as red lights are less annoying than white lights at night. Interestingly, when people shot guns at tower lights, they tended to aim at white lights more often than red ones—or they tended to aim more at white lights than red lights.
I'm in the process of replacing a xenon flash tube and trigger transformer. Straight xenon flash tubes are about $300 each, and trigger transformers are about $125 each. When a tower owner performs biennial maintenance on a high-intensity lighting system, it typically costs about $11,000 in parts for the lighting system alone.
