[TowerTalk] Grounding

[john at kk9a.com]

GL rebuilding Keith.

A tower lightning strike will cause an induced voltage spike in a  
home's electrical system, even if nothing is connected to the tower.   
I have had this occur while building a new tower and the control  
cables and coax were not yet connected or even touching the tower.  
Simply disconnecting the coax which many hams do is ineffective  
lightning protection. There is a lot of valuable protection  
information on this list. Assuming that you have a bunch of ground  
rods and a SPG, I would suggest a good whole house surge protector.

John KK9A

from [Keith Dutson] NM5G

My experience is that lightning can be managed, to a point.  A direct strike
to your tower can be catastrophic.  I suffered one on May 9.  My daughter
lives about 600 feet away and witnessed the strike.  She said sparks flew in
all directions.  My losses are huge.  I am working with the insurance
company, and expect the total damage to be well in excess of $50K.  There is
evidence that high voltage appeared on the tower, power lines, phone lines
(fiber) and even on my wi-fi connection from the house to the shack.  Every
gigabit switch was toasted, and every PC connected was blown.  Another big
loss was two large screen TVs, both connected to internet via gigabit
switches.  Repairs were successful by replacing the power supplies.

All this, plus my main two stations, both with Yaesu FTDX9000D and Alpha
87A, are gone.  Coax was not even connected because I had just reconfigured
the station and had not completed the coax switching section.  However,
units were plugged into power, and the Yaesu transceivers were connected to
the PCs.

73, Keith NM5G