The FAA requires that a tether be conspicuous the flying public by day or night. AOPA, EAA, and NAAA have all lined up to demand this standard be enforced. Any AWES development team unable to comply is unlikely to advance against this combined opposition.
Crosswind AWES seems rather disadvantaged, as the requirement entails large FAA-orange-and-white banners and marking FA-red lights of a minimum brightness every fifty feet of tether. Virtually every crosswind team responding to the FAA question over AWES conspicuity expressed a problem with either the added tether aerodrag or how these devices will meet power-needs or cope with winching.
A KiteLab Group solution to the single-line crosswind case is sweeping stacks of wings, an orange or white wing every 50 ft, with an embedded RAT to drive the lighting. Required conspicuity thus becomes naturally easy and even exceedable. A stack of wings generally develops far more power than a single wing. Stacks have been long known in sport-kite circles as a powerful standard configuration. The wings could stack and unstack at the ground by gripping or releasing* (or hanking on and off) the tether as it is extended or retracted from its winch.
Thus the aviation conspicuity "problem" is converted into a synergistic virtue.
I see no problem with compliance to that visibility standard for a dense stack of rotating rings.
As for the cable car type clamping... inspiration from that thought thanks Dave.
It has so many obvious advantages for rigging, launching and recovery.
And could in all probability, with enough gizmo, be done on a live spinning system.
As for clamping on a line with COTS, sailing hardware is our obvious expedient, there are plenty of cam cleats, clam cleats, clutches, and jammers to choose from; the simplest light ABS plastic types are particularly suitable and cheap. In combination with preventer stoppers, shackles, and/or kite-killers, this is a very optimal method.
The current kiter's low tech method is to wrap the kiteline about eight times around an Alu carabiner to attach junk, but this is hard to do under tension. KiteLab Ilwaco has developed simple bent wire line attachment hardware suited for small systems. These work and are more handy and far cheaper than 'biners.
The Alpine Butterfly Knot is good for adding attachment loops on a line; the high safety margin required for line nicks allows for the small loss of breaking strength the knot introduces, (replace nicked or abraded sections as they are found, as they act progressively; a quick fix is to tie a Butterfly to isolate damage on the loop created).
Bunny ears is my favourite fun to tie and use knot ... must use it in my kite repertoire.