At 09:43 PM 4/19/03 -0500, John Desmond wrote:
>If you will be at Dayton this year, I strongly suggest attending the
>Lightning Protection Forum. It is Friday May 16th room 3 at 8:15 AM. If
>this is the one that is put on my Polyphaser, it is excellent. I plan on
>going to it again as a refresher.
I'm skeptical about applying the Polyphaser solution in most ham
installations. Their approach is designed for situations where the site
must be on 24/7 and recover quickly and gracefully from lightning
strikes. Typically, the equipment shelters are purpose-built, incorporate
features like the shortest-possible low-inductance grounding conductors,
and are sited right at the foot of the tower. My concern is that you can
spend hundreds of dollars on protectors for every conductor from the tower,
linking the tower and shack grounds with large-diameter copper, and all the
rest, and still be caught short because of inadequacies in your
single-point grounding that are not readily soluble in typical ham shack
environments. Indeed, because of a false sense of security, you may wind
up suffering more damage than would be the case if you just made a practice
of disconnecting all conductors outside the house bulkhead.
Just my opinion -- worth what you paid for it.
73, Pete N4ZR
The World HF Contest Station Database was updated 11 April 03.
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