[TowerTalk] Grounding

[Chuck Dietz]

Disconnecting the coax, control lines AND ground connection can help
protect your equipment from voltages induced from nearby strikes.

Chuck W5PR

On Wed, Sep 4, 2019 at 10:45 AM <john at kk9a.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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