At 10:23 PM 8/12/2003 +0000, you wrote:
>Okay, here's how I size this up after reading all the mail on the subject:
>
>Bonding everything together--This is what you do if you really really know
>what you are doing, and have all your Is dotted and Ts crossed. Since I
>don't know what I'm doing, and don't have time to wade through the jargon
>you guys are using a lot of which is meaningless to me, and filter out the
>wives tales, going this route means calling in the experts and paying some
>outfit like Harger to come in, with all their fancy equipment and do a
>site study, measure ground conductivity at my place, dig trenches, sink 20
>foot rods, cad-weld everything with nice big copper flashing everywhere 5
>feet deep and then I'd take a direct hit with no probs, except my cheap
>ham antenna would vaporize since it's not a $20K commercial job from Andrew.
>And Harger would bill me ten thousand bucks (as if I can afford that). If
>I did it all myself, being a ham, I'd probably do it half-a**ed, get
>something wrong somewhere, and burn the house down.
Nice flame bait.
You *could* learn about it. I'm certainly no expert, and there are short
white-papers on Polyphaser's web site about the subject. They aren't
written in jargon.
>Or I could disconnect everything. Hmmm.
>
>Here's a question--at what height do you really have to start getting
>worried about this stuff? My highest antenna is about 38 feet high (a
>vertical) but I have a couple of trees within 100' that are 45 to 60' tall.
If you have mains connected to your gear, you have to worry. In the last
ten years, the only thing I lost was an underprotected Sony TV.
If you are looking for some "rules of thumb" try these:
1) spend about 15% of the cost of your gear to protect it.
2) If doing it "right" the first time is difficult, do it incrementally,
most important parts first.
3) Don't do anything that'll make things worse.
That approach worked for me, but what do I know... I'm a mere Technician
with $10k+ in ham and monitoring gear, who wants to never have to send
his RX-340 back for repairs.
--
Eric F. Richards
efricha@dimensional.com
"The weird part is that I can feel productive even when I'm doomed."
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