[TowerTalk] Grounding Help

Phil Camera kb9cry at comcast.net
Mon Sep 11 09:46:38 EDT 2006


I'll intersperse my comments within snippets of the original post.

I'm hoping to get some wire and ground rods down within the next 
couple of weeks but I'm not sure what type of wire specifically I 
should be using. 


I use #4 bare solid.  Larger is OK but don't use stranded.


I'm going to encircle 3 sides of the house (4th 
side is a long driveway), 

Yay!

and a small circle around the base of my 
70' crank up tower with each of the 3 legs connected to a ground rod 
and in a circle, 

Nope.  No need to encircle the tower legs' ground rods, the tower itself will do the job of distributing the energy amongst the ground radials.  But you need min. of 50 to max of 75 ft. of ground radials connected to each leg with rods every 2X rod height.  Read the Polyphaser technical articles for more discussion.  Do what they recommend; don't skimp, do it right.


which in turn will be connected to the larger length 
of wire around the house.

Double Yah!!

go around the house and tie into the service ground, it looks like 
I need about 100-150' of wire (I haven't measured exactly yet, but 
it's close to that).

Triple Yah.  Where your cables enter into the house will be another ground rod (or more if needed) which will be your SPG.  To this you connect all the grounds from all your lightning arrestors, which are on every cable going into the shack, as well as a ground wire coming out of the shack to which all your shack equipment grounds are connected.  Very simple actually but you need to do everything listed for a properly designed system which will work as advertised.


Couple of questions:
1) Should I also run additional "radials" emanating from this 
arrangement, out into the back yard, or does that make a significant 
difference?

See tower leg ground radials discussion above.  One can never be overgrounded but there is a point of diminishing returns.


2) What gauge and type of wire should be used for this project? In 
what I've read, I've seen many different opinions. 6 solid, 4 solid, 
10 stranded, etc? And I'm guessing this will obviously need to be 
bare copper, not insulated! 

#4 bare solid or larger.

My electrician is clueless about this 
kind of grounding, of course -- he thinks I'm crazy, believing one or 
two ground rods bound to AC ground are all I need!

He only knows the NEC safety electrical ground.  It's not his fault.

 a 
way to get 'em much deeper than that unless I hire a contractor, 
something that's not really in the budget at this point if not 100% necessary.

Mine are about that depth also.  The recommended depth is about 12 inches though.

4) Where can I buy the proper stainless steel hardware to take a 
copper strap from a tower leg (and for that matter, a good place for 
copper strapping nowadays!), then bind it to a 5/8" ground rod?

Polyphaser, ICE, Harger


5) I'd really like to Cadweld this system together, but frankly I 
know nothing about this process, and the more I read the more 
confused I become, and the more it seems the only way I can do this 
is by investing some very heavy-duty dollars (special molds, ignitors, etc).

Erico makes CadWeld OneShots which is what I use (also available from RF Connection) and Harger makes UniShots which are pretty much the same thing.  Here's some webpages with pictures.
http://www.k2ut.org/cadweld.htm
http://www.therfc.com/cadweld.htm
http://www.paigewire.com/DWG/CadweldInstallationInstructions.pdf#search=%22cadweld%20one%20shot%20%22

I'm really in WAY over my head, I'm not really mechanically-inclined 


No you're not.  You've got the basic understanding down pat.  It's not that hard.

Phil  KB9CRY


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