[TowerTalk] my long lightning story (was RE: lightning strike)

[Charles Gallo]

On 5/30/2008 Roger (K8RI) wrote:

> According to the NWS literature a strike a mile away can induce voltages
> as high as a 1000 volts per meter in a piece of wire.

One interesting item of note, and this article is making me "think" (a bad thing)

This weekend I got a tour of a USCG Cutter (The Katherine Walker WLM 552), and something I noticed when we walked past the LAN room - they are NOT using 100BaseT LANs, but everything is fibre optics

I wonder if fibre (which, interestingly is mostly "the past" in LAN design, as gigabit baseT is around) would be the/A future way to deal with our gear.  Think - no ground loop potential, no voltage surge potential etc.  Not cheap, by a long shot, but...

I mean, we HAVE to switch to USB in the near future, be interesting if we could jump to fibre

and RE Serial Ports.  Back when I used to work in electronics for a living, computers were still VERY expensive items, and I designed a few ISA cards for custom work (did you know that IBM sold a tech manual with all the voltages/pinouts and timings of all the busses?) Anyway, one of my managers insisted that EVERY signal in and out of those cards go through an optoisolator.  The ones I was using only had a few hundred volt rating, but I will tell you - sometimes nasty stuff happened to the units I was connected to, and we lost an optoisolator, but we NEVER lost a PC.  Guess that's how you build things when you are used to building things "Mil Spec" - you should have seen some of the specs for "out of tolerance" voltage inputs on some of the units we worked on.  TTL level input  - hit it with 1000 volts, make sure things still worked
--  
73 de KG2V

For the Children - RKBA!

Ox2B | ~0x2B