[TowerTalk] Ground Rod Myths?

[Jon Pearl - W4ABC]

Hi Gary,

I used this method a few years back and found that it worked very quickly.

If you use an appropriately sized female garden hose repair coupler, 
such as 
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Ray-Padula-Metal-5-8-in-Garden-Hose-Female-Thread-Repair-with-Stainless-Steel-Clamps-RP-RIFR-6/205167514 
and pound it into a piece of appropriately sized EMT, you'll have the 
all that you need.  I (lightly) held the EMT in a vice and inserted the 
nipple end of the coupler into the EMT.  I inserted a ratchet socket 
into the female hose end of the coupler and used a hammer to tap the 
back of the socket so as to drive the nipple end into the EMT.

To install the ground rod, you simply turn on the water supply and start 
driving the 10' stick of EMT into the soil till you reach the desired 
depth.  Turn off the water supply, remove the EMT and drop your ground 
rod.  Once I had the rods at the desired depth, I once again used water 
to back fill some of the soil that was pushed up out of the hole by the 
water.  Since I'm in central Florida & the soil is pretty sandy, I found 
that refilling the hole around the ground rod works pretty well as 
there's a lot of resistance by the ground rod to being pulled back out 
by hand after back filling.

I just took a picture of a 1/2" ground rod sitting along side a 10' 
piece of 1/2" EMT with the female repair coupler attached and I placed 
it on my web site at http://www.w4abc.com/hydrogroundrod.html



73,


Jon Pearl - W4ABC
www.w4abc.com


On 4/23/2014 9:22 AM, Gary Smith wrote:
> I used to live in NE Illinois and in southern Louisiana and that's
> exactly how I did my long grounding rods. No stones at all to run
> into. Here in Connecticut it took a lot of effort to find exact
> placement for my HI-Z Rx array, the soil is one big rock with a thin
> surface layer dirt on top. Get a few inches down & hit solid.
>
> 73,
>
> Gary
> KA1J
>
>


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