[TowerTalk] Verticals and well pipe grounding

[Donald Chester]

Kevin Kidd kkbroadcastengineering at gmail.com <mailto:towertalk%40contesting.com?Subject=Re%3A%20%5BTowerTalk%5D%20Verticals%20and%20well%20pipe%20grounding&In-Reply-To=%3CCAHL64sFSQiDOQ9jEFBMNv%2B7c58Fugo334R%3DMoQ_uRh7WYObTug%40mail.gmail.com%3E> wrote:


>
> If you have any semblance of a radial ground system, I don't find this
> surprising.  We bond to well casings for lightning grounds at AM broadcast
> towers but they don't provide much in the way of an RF ground system.
>

RF only penetrates the ground a few feet.  A 190' well casing wouldn't be
much better than a couple of 8' ground rods.


>
And then there is the local case where an owner bought into the myth and
had a 190ft (to match the tower height, well past the water table)
drilled.  His dufus engineer (not this dufus) had the driller put a PVC
casing in his deep, expensive, mostly useless hole...
>

For what it would be worth, all he would have had to do was to attach a
weight to a couple of hundred feet of copper wire cable and lower in into
the well.  But the bare PVC pipe would have made almost as good an RF
ground.

Reminds me of the story of the farmer who dropped a stick of dynamite into
his well to see what would happen. To his surprise, when it exploded,
it blasted his well completely out of the ground.  He managed to salvage
it by sawing it into short lengths and using them for fence post holes.


Don k4kyv








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