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Re: [TowerTalk] Back of desk grounding buss

To: <towertalk@contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Back of desk grounding buss
From: "Stan Labinsky Jr." <K2STN@frontier.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 11:42:44 -0400
List-post: <towertalk@contesting.com">mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
To all;

A long, long time ago, I sat through a "grounding and shielding" course provided by my employer by a company involved in making sure that the guy in the black van in the parking lot couldn't see what was on your computer's monitor screen because it and its connecting cables were radiating the display data. The big word used at the time was Tempest.

One point the instructor made was to look at your whole system setup from a top down attitude (like you were the ceiling) and make sure that all of the interconnections came from a common hub, like an old wagon wheel. But, there should ONLY be spokes... NO WHEEL-RIM. No cross connections from one spoke to another which would create a magnetic loop capable of coupling both in and out.

How's this work? Well, the HF rig connects to the amplifier and then to the tuner and then to the entrance panel. The VHF rig the same way. But NO connections between either radio unless that lead ran from the HF rig to the entrance panel and then back out to the VHF rig, like fingers of a hand. That means that all the line power line cords and any chassis bonding follow that same path as well.

Could it become clumsy?  Sure, but you have no loops.

Years later I was involved in building a piece of factory semi-conductor manufacturing equipment. I rigorously followed that overall scheme in the electronic/electrical design.

It paid off big time when the output of the 20 meter (actually 13.56MHz.) 15kW RF generator was left unconnected by the maintenance guy, the coax cable center pin laying against the tool's frame. All seemed to go well, except that the glow in the chamber didn't come on. It was a plasma deposition tool.

The generator had reached an output of 4,500 watts before one of the control computers forgot what it was supposed to do.

Was this post a bit long winded? Yes! But, does the scheme work? I guess it does.

Stan


-----Original Message----- From: Ian White
Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2014 6:34 PM
To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Back of desk grounding buss

Jim K9YC wrote:

Those interconnections, especially analog audio, is one big reason why
chassis-to-chassis bonding is far better than running individual wires
to a common point (or bus bar).
.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk...
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