[TowerTalk] Grounding, Lightning & corona discharge

[Jerry Keller]

Pete.. I put in a peripheral ground system, but I didn't have to dig a trench. I used my gas edger to cut a slot in the lawn from the AC service entrance around the house to my SPG box, and then for good measure I continued the rest of the way around with the exception of the driveway. For that, I used a 4" wide concrete block chisel to cut a 3" - 5" deep slot in the blacktop where it meets the concrete garage floor pan. I laid a full circle of #4 solid copper around, with ground rods every 15-20 feet along the length of it. Everything is tied to this peripheral ground....the service ground (I put in a second one, I didn't know how long the first one had been in) plus the ground rods for the vertical and the tower. There are rods every 15 - 20 feet along every leg longer than that, and three rods in a string on each leg of the tower. Every piece of equipment in the shack is tied to the same ground bus, which goes direct to the SPG.

It was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it.

73,  Jerry K3BZ
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Pete Smith 
  To: towertalk at contesting.com 
  Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 9:39 AM
  Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Grounding, Lightning & corona discharge


  At 09:03 AM 7/29/2004, Tom Rauch wrote:
  >A single ground wire from the shunt protection is clamped to
  >the power line ground.
  >
  >This is the national code.


  Illustrative of the difficulties of doing the single-point ground thing 
  properly with an old house, our telephone and cable TV connections are 180 
  degrees around the house from the AC power entrance, grounded to a rod at 
  that point, so there is undoubtedly a fair amount of resistance between the 
  two grounds.  Just to further complicate things, our telephones are in 
  parallel to the telco box rather than in series.

  I would have to trench in a perimeter ground, per Polyphaser 
  recommendations, before anything else would begin to make sense.


  73, Pete N4ZR
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