Topband: My grounding scheme

[Dan Bookwalter]

I do not recall if I posted this last year or not , but , due to circumstances I was not able to implement this , however , I will be starting on it shortly....

keep in mind that I am living in a rental house so there is only so much I can do....

All ground rods are 5/8" copper clad steel , I cut them in half so they are only 4' , driving 8' into this ground gets very difficult , the tower is a UST TX-472.

There will be 4 ground rods at the tower base , one off each corner all tied together,then about a 130' run of #6 solid to another pair of rods at the base of the house below the window(2nd floor) where the shack is , then run up to a 1/4" thick copper plate in the window where the feed line comes in via a bulkhead connector. Everything in the shack will be bonded to this copper plate. At the base of the house I will run a wire through the basement o the mains ground for the house. All connections to ground rods will be exothermically welded. I was going to run grounds from at least 2 of the tower legs (using stainless between the tower and copper ground wire) to the ground rods at the base of the tower. At the base of the tower is a DX Engineering radial plate that will be bonded to the ground system , the feed line will be a grounded at the tower base via another bulkhead connector in the radial plate before going to the RCS-10 remote switch.

I think that covers everything...

Dan N8DCJ

p.s. I was thinking of running some radials (#14 or larger) off of the ground rods at the house purely to help dissipate and lighting energy that may get to that point , thoughts ?