Paul K7HSV, Sounds like you are experiencing voltage drop at the tower base. When you try to raise the tower the current draw of the winch motor is droping the line voltage to the tower below where t
Hello WW, You might think about a copper wire cage around the tower. The larger diameter of say a 4 wire cage would increase the bandwidth around your design frequency and bypass any not quite perfec
Too much concrete base showing with 9'x9' base slab brought to surface? Why not a simple box a foot or so bigger than tower footprint for the last 6 inches or so. Just backfill the rest of the area w
Ufer grounds are bare solid copper wire buried in the first 3 inches of a concrete pour with the tail brought above the surface to tie into whatever you need to ground. The NEC (National Electrical C
Hello JC, I would still encase the cu pipe in the concrete for several reasons. First the concrete enhances the contact area between the conductor and the soil. Second it isolates the cu from the soi
I agree entirely, the concrete either has corroded rebar or had pockets from poor construction techniques when it was poured where water gathered. NEC does require a gound both for electrical safety
Hello Chris, Yes I could with the cravat that you MUST provide a low impedance ground path to building ground and a lightning ground system.This path must be direct as possible and all bends radiused
The mention of buried tower section in slab was to infer that lightning going down this steel doesn't cause exploding bases either. One more myth busting to exploding base myth. The extra ring outsid
I vote for the 4 pole folded dipole with the dipoles spaced 90 deg.around a mast horizontally and phasing harness distance vertically. The commercial type where the dipoles are welded to arm on half
Re: 20 ft. Ufer CEGE The 20 ft. length has seemed to hang up many on its ability to do everything needed for lightning protection. That was not the intention of the original post. The 20 ft. is the M
Hello all, We all need to remember that JC's base was not just a simple hole in the ground but had 81 square feet of bottom contact alone, not counting side areas. The rebar was to be bonded to the c
No form of connection directly to the concrete will give you any additional radial length or ability to dissipate any currents. You would need a low impedance connection to any( a lot of driveways do
There are commercial products available to use in lew of blunt lightning rods. They are of heavy stainless steel construction and built to connect to large ground leads at tower tops. Lots of spikey
Hi Mike, You are right in a general sense. But if you do check at the base and are able to vary the vertical length and the radial length, you will find that there is a correlation between the radial
There are several cravat's I can see to this process. !. At the temperatures you need to braze you might burn through the individual strands of the AWG#2 stranded before you had the rod up to temp..
To all, Please be aware that most Vermiculite contains free flying asbestos and needs to be treated as such. Anywhere you run into it whether as insulation in housing, as filler in planting mediums,
Hi Gary, The key words to your posting on exploding bases was the fact stated that the base section or bolts were the ONLY ground attached to the tower. I nor other have never stated that would be a
Gary, My assumption was that the coax shield had been grounded prior to conduit which removes the voltage build up due to choke effect of conduit. Bonding at each end of conduit would eliminate curre
Gary, Your claims about your rabbit foot(or feet?) has arroused my curiousity. Please give me some details so that I can duplicate your results here. A few questions have come to mind: 1. What color
Gary, The shuttle has been hit both on pad and in air. The wire you mentioned is less effective than your rabbits foot as it doesn't stop down strokes with multiple branches. Please tell NASA of your