[TowerTalk] Back of desk grounding buss

[Jim Lux]

On 3/22/14 2:51 PM, Randy Lake wrote:
> Okay. I am going to go out on a limb here and expect to take a beating with
> the hopes that other people in the group might benefit from my example.
>
> I do not have any of my equipment connected to a ground buss. My coax is
> not connected to the tower at the top and bottom. My tower is not bonded to
> ground rods. The bottom set of guys on a 100' rohn 25 has no insulators and
> goes directly to ground.
> I have no RFI issues. My neighbors have no RFI issues. I have had 2 near
> strikes and lost the well pump, some peripherals inside but no radio
> equipment. Maybe I am extremely lucky.
> I am ready for the influx of comments and honestly I am looking forward to
> hearing them.
>
>


Nahh.. you've made a rational decision based on your particular 
situation. Certainly, you could go out and spend tens or hundreds of 
thousands of dollars making your setup the envy of transient protection 
experts the world around.  Or, you can just accept the risk that it 
might someday go poof, and spend that cash on something else.

Modern consumer equipment is surprisingly tough with respect to 
transients.  As a side effect of FCC and CE EMI/EMC rules, and the 
desire to avoid warranty returns for ESD damage, equipment is, in 
general, much better designed today than 30-40 years ago, particularly 
when it comes to things with ICs in them.

WHen you have ICs with feature sizes so tiny that you can fit a whole 
CPU in the size of one of the transistors in a 7400 series SSI TTL, you 
have to design for durability from the beginning.

When's the last time you blew up a RS232 or printer interface with ESD 
or line voltage transients on a computer?  That used to be remarkably 
common in the 80s.  It just doesn't happen these days. It takes a pretty 
egregious event to kill something (like the MV/LV short I had happen.. 
and now that I think about it, that was back in the 80s, too)