[TowerTalk] Mot R36 related to NUMBER of installed ground rods

[Chris Hoelzle]

I am intending to have two circles of ground rods (ten foot) around my towers. One question as I look at the thotos supplied by K9YC is whether to use solid or stranded ground wire. 

Is there a preferred wire and why?

Thanks

W7MI
Chris Hoelzle 
choelzle at cox.net 
Bandon, OR
-----Original Message-----
From: TowerTalk [mailto:towertalk-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of Jim Brown
Sent: Friday, November 03, 2017 11:00 AM
To: towertalk at contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Mot R36 related to NUMBER of installed ground rods

Jim Lux's post on this cuts to the heart of the issue -- it's impedance that matters most, and that's dominated by inductance, not resistance. And yes, the contribution of those rods farther from the tower decreases with the length of wire connecting them to the tower. It really is a matter of when does your back give out. :)

My tower is 250 ft of coax from the shack, I have lousy (rocky) soil, the tower is surrounded by hundreds of trees that are at least 50 ft taller than the tower, and the lightning activity map shows my QTH to have close to the lowest activity in the US. I stopped at one rod on each leg. Perhaps I should have done more.

Last week, I installed the Rohn grounding clamps on the legs of my 120 ft Rohn 25 tower, replacing the ones that DX Engineering sells. Here are photos of two of the clamps, taken from different angles to show how they attach. The wire is #4, I cleaned it around the clamps with vinegar before installing. Some of he individual strands above the clamp are used to attach radials (the tower acts as a passive reflector for two quarter-wave wires sloping away from the tower that I load on 160M from the base of those wires).

k9yc.com/Photo/TowerGroundClamp1.jpg
k9yc.com/Photo/TowerGroundClamp2.jpg

The clamps were recommended here by N0AX, and I really like them. Very robust, very easy to install.  The bottom 4 ft of my tower is buried in the pour, and I painted the tower sections (on the ground) to minimize their visibility. The paint and bits of concrete around the clamp was scraped to provide the greatest practical contact. Three copper straps from the pour are clamped to the wires near where they emerge.

I posted links to a source for these clamps last week.

73, Jim K9YC

On 11/3/2017 9:58 AM, Jeff wrote:
> In one of the Polyphaser documents they talk about the rise time and 
> length of a strike duration.  Forget the details but the conclusion 
> was that rods further out than about 50' would not be effective 
> because the strike would be over before the outlying rods came into play.


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