[TowerTalk] Grounding, Bonding and Basement Shack Location?

[Kirk Kleinschmidt]

Hi, gang,
I'm moving to a new QTH in a week or so, and I'm looking for some practical, "baby steps" advice about grounding, bonding and shack location.
I have never had tall towers and, unfortunately, I will only have a couple of 50-footers at the new place, probably AFTER the winter. I have been a ham since 1977, and I have never really done much in the way of proper bonding and routing, etc. I haven't had any lightning hits, but I have fried the front end transistors in an old Alinco DX-70 by "receiving" static on a large horizontal loop and not properly bleeding it.
I want to take some small steps in the right direction now, as I install my two temporary antennas (a 40-meter horizontal loop and a ground-mounted inverted-L over a 500-square-foot ground screen).
Here's the situation:
The house is a completely typical mid-'70s rambler. The main floor and the front yard and under the domain of She Who Must Be Obeyed. The basement, the second (external) garage, and the rest of the 1-acre yard are allocated to ham radio and man cave operations.
So, first order of business is to decide exactly where, in the 1,000 square-foot, rectangular basement, to locate the shack. All feeds -- electrical power (overhead drop, which may be buried one day), telephone (buried), cable TV (overhead drop, which may be buried one day), and ham coax and control cables all come into the house at one point: about the middle of the south basement wall (long side of the rambler). The breaker box is right there on the upper part of the basement wall. Outside (other side of wall / breaker box location) is an old, somewhat anemic-looking single ground rod. It wiggles side to side a bit. Not sure if that indicates anything pro or con. My soil is 1 foot black topsoil, then 20 feet of sand, then rockier "earth's crust" kinda stuff.
In reading the mail on this reflector for a month or so, I gather that having all "house penetrating" feeds in one spot is somewhat fortunate. Building on that, I'm trying to "locate" my shack. Do I put it right at the combined feed location (right under and in front of the ac breaker box / service feed), or do I place it on the same basement wall, but 25 feet away from the service point (small room in basement)?
If it's 25 feet away, should I run my coax and control cables inside the basement so they can exit the basement near the combined service feed location? If I let the ham cables exit the basement in the far-away spot, that will violate the "single entry" rule, right?
My initial thoughts are to place a ground bus/backplane in a steel or aluminum box just outside the service entrance area in the back yard, and have all coax and control cables "bond" and be connected inside to the common electrical safety ground. The theory is to keep the unwanted electrical energy outside the house, if possible.
Initially, the control cables will have disconnects and the coax cables will at least have grounding blocks, with an eventual upgrade to lightning / static discharge-style grounding blocks.
Am I on the right track here? I don't have a huge budget, but that should improve next season, so I want to "start" and then upgrade my station grounding / bonding.
Should I replace the existing wiggly ground rod with 1, 2 or three new rods?
As always, your help is greatly appreciated,
--Kirk, NT0Z

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