On 4/9/17 4:01 PM, Roger (K8RI) on TT wrote:
Agreed, lightning is an RF event and the feedpoint is probably the best
place to start.
My thoughts on the direct path to the amp, were not toward a DC event,
it's just a lot easier for the residual voltage to traverse. I say
residual voltage as reducing the potential to around 300 volts, give or
take means a lot less for the buried coax to reduce.
An air spark gap will get you no lower than 327V.. 500 is more like a
reasonable goal. An sealed gas gap can go a bit lower. And of course,
there's semiconductor transient suppression devices.
I'd also ground
the coax shield with a network of ground rods (at least three spaced at
120 degrees and at least 6' to 8' spacing) where the coax enters the
ground under the antenna.
Perhaps a spark gap (with fine points) at the feedpoint followed by a
gas discharge device where the coax enters the ground, lowering the
pulse entering the coax to less than several hundred volts and something
like a polyphaser where the coax enters the shack at the common point
ground. The inductance and capacitance of the 100' of coax should
greatly reduce that voltage before it gets to the polyphaser/rig.
Actually, the coax won't reduce the voltage - it would depend on the
source and load impedances, and if it's "matched" then it's just the RF
or DC loss. 1dB would be, what, 12%...
Before the transient suppressor "fires", your coax is probably looking
into a matched load (or close to it)
IOW, tackle it in steps, or stages instead of one brute force method.
Definitely. Clamp early and often.
Think about this, too: is it energy or voltage that's the thing you're
trying to deal with - some devices are sensitive to overvoltage, others
are more sensitive to impulse energy, so something that clamps the
voltage might not actually reduce the energy, it would just make a short
pulse into a long one.
For semiconductor devices, a significant over voltage (e.g. above the
supply voltage of the part) typically results in some diode becoming
forward biased, and the damage is actually from excess current flowing
through the circuit. The traditional way on logic gates and such that
have high input impedances is to put a series resistor to limit the
current.
For instance, if you have a balanced line receiver (like for RS422) you
terminate the twisted pair into 100 ohms (so the line is matched and you
can send data at high speeds, then have 10k -20k in series into the
megohm input impedance of the line receiver. 100V on the input through
the 10k is only 10 mA of fault current, which typically is something
that the on-chip devices can handle, particularly if it's short duration
(milliseconds).
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