[TowerTalk] Ground Windows

Al Williams alwilliams at olywa.net
Fri Jul 28 12:08:20 EDT 2006


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Brown" <jim at audiosystemsgroup.com>
Sent: Friday, July 28, 2006 8:29 AM
> There is considerable misunderstanding (and junk science)
> regarding so-called "single point grounds." There is a tutorial on
> power and grounding on my website. While it is specifically
> written for pro audio and video, it is directly applicable to ham
> installations as well.
>
> In general, single point (often called "star") grounding provides
> the greatest noise immunity low frequencies (below about 100 kHZ),
> and multipoint grounding (often called "mesh") grounding provides
> the greatest at radio frequencies.

Very interesting.  About 30 years ago I designed an automatic test set 
utilizing several thousand IC's and transistors packaged on a host of wire 
wrap boards in several drawers.  I followed the single point grounding 
concept with the result that the system had a lot of random glitches 
occurring.  Finally, my tech started changing the wires going to the single 
point ground and instead grounding them to the nearest ground.

This cured the glitch problem and I have never understood why?

k7puc

BTW, I had read numerous articles on how to ground digital type circuits 
when I followed the concept. 



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