[TowerTalk] Site Grounding
Jim Lux
jimlux at earthlink.net
Tue Oct 21 10:49:17 EDT 2003
At 10:44 AM 10/21/2003 -0500, Mark Beckwith wrote:
>I just wrote:
>
> >Does it make sense to bury some length of flashing
> >instead of driving a rod, then? Is depth an
>
>...uh, "issue?"
>
>This one got away before I finished typing. I hate it when that
>
>Mark, N5OT
Indeed, it's more of a surface area in contact with the soil than a depth
of penetration issue. Burying the rod horizontally in a trench a foot deep
is probably as good as driving it 10 feet deep.
Recall though, that a "ground" can serve several functions: RF grounds can
actually be insulated (since the capacitive coupling from wire to soil is
substantial); Lightning grounds need to take very high peak currents (and
also have DC conductivity); Electrical safety grounds need to carry
sufficient current to insure that circuit breakers trip and that the
enclosure of device with a fault remains safe to touch; Signal common is
yet another "ground", where you're concerned about common mode voltages, etc.
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