[Amps] Grounds and Grounding

[HAROLD B MANDEL]

In living through 41 years of hearing telephone engineers
argue about proper Grounding one particular Method makes
its way through: Single Point Grounding.

Base Station Transmitter cellular tower sites have an
a.c. electrical ground, a D.C. Power plant reference
ground, a telephone Network Interface ground and
an R.F. ground for the transmitter chains, not to mention
the Frame Grounds on all the bays.

There are ground rods sunk all over the place, and the tower
or monopole steel has copper straps over the concrete
plinths leading to the grounding.

The point here is that all of this grounding is bonded together.

No one system has a grounding that is not wired to the rest
of the system. What is called a Ground Ring of 2AWG tinned
bare copper is buried 18 to 24 inches below ground and is
cadwelded to the tops of all the ground rods and all the
connecting leads from all the above grade appliances.

The end result is that with the connection of a device
called a Megohmeter the measured ground resistance
is at the specified five ohm point.

Whatever choice our readers make about  shack grounding,
the important point is to electrically bond all points
together. This way, with a possible transient fault, no
one grounding will be above potential of another,
(reasonably, of course).

Hal
W4HBM