[Boatanchors] Ground wire?

[Phil]

Hi All,
This is the summer of "fixing needed things up around the shack".  One 
of the things that's needed work for a number of years was the ground 
system (there is NO room around this mobile home for a large spread of 
buried radial ground wires).  For the past twelve years the ground 
consisted of one copper clad 8 foot ground rod, one 10 foot galvanized 
rod (the service entrance ground), and two skinny 4 foot ground rods 
that are now a pile of rust, all tied together at odd distances (for 1/4 
wave spacing elimination).

This mobile home park is a HIGH NOISE dark hole and the existing ground 
system DID help reduce noise a great deal, though I had to water them in 
the summer to lower the noise floor.  The 'real ground was probably only 
the ten foot and eight foot ground rods.  I've never had an "RF in the 
shack problem", even when using end fed or "top loaded Tee" antennas 
against ground

Anyway, today I purchased three more 8 foot copper clad rods and drove 
them in the ground.  Two spaced 30 inches apart right where the ground 
wire enters the shack (nice short cable to the under-bench ground bus).  
Another one about a foot from the old 8 foot rod, which is located by 
the North Push-up antenna pole.  The 10 foot service entrance rod is 
between the two groups of 8 foot rods.  Everything spaced out so that 
the "1/4 wave Isolation rule" doesn't come into play, that is I should 
have an effective ground for any given frequency 50KHz to 30MHz.   ONE 4 
foot rod will remain in service as it seems to be serviceable, the other 
one I drove in down to ground level.

Now the question.  The total run to tie all grounds together is about 18 
feet.  I wanted to purchase some copper tubing and have a friend braze 
it to all rods in an unbroken length to tie them together.  However, the 
budget is about shot, copper tubing is out of the question for now.  I'm 
presently using odd lengths of 18Ga stranded wire for TEMPORARY use 
(yeah, I know, not the best for RF circuits).

I know that they frequently use aluminum wire for electrical service 
grounds.  Anybody see a problem using it in this application?  Perhaps 
it's not as good as a heavy gauge single strand copper wire for RF, but 
just might be better than I now have.  I could then have one continuous 
unbroken run for the ground, at least until I can perhaps do the copper 
tubing and braze job later. . .

By the way, the addition of three new ground rods, even with funky 
wiring interconnects already made a HUGE difference in the noise floor 
at LF and the BCB!!!

-- 
73 de Phil,  KO6BB
http://ko6bb1.multiply.com/ (OTR Blog)
http://www.qsl.net/ko6bb/  (Web Page)

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