[Towertalk] Proper way to ground open-wire feeders

[Tony Casciato, AI9X]

Hello All,
I have been enjoying this list, especially recently with all the text about
grounding. My question is about how anyone is grounding 450-ohm line as it
enters the house. My antenna is only up about 30 feet, so maybe not a big
lightning risk, but I am concerned just the same. I did have the line coming
in a basement window, then a small knife switch with one side connected to
the cold water pipe - I was uneasy about bringing lightning inside for that.

Options:
1) Manually disconnect outside the basement window, then connect both wires
to a ground rod about 4' away.
2) Leave connected all the time, since the tuner's balun is grounding the
line to the house ground.
3) Leave connected, but put some sort of ICE or spark-gap device outside
connected to ground rod.
4) Replace the 30' high doublet with better antennas (Sigma vertical clones)
and use coax.
5) Go back to the knife switch and cold-water pipe ground inside.

Again, since the tuner does ground the line, is it worth worrying about at
all? If I put a seperate ground rod outside, doesn't a strike propagate to
the house wiring grounds (which the radios' are connected to for RF)? Is
that a ground loop then?

Sorry for the bandwidth, but I have been fussing over this for a while. I
like using open-wire especially for a small city lot and multi-band
operation. I don't have a lot of space or finances, so simple antennas are
used for now. I am always thinking of better approaches, and might this year
yet.

73,
Tony, AI9X