[Elecraft] ESD precautions?

[Stuart Rohre]

Two important concepts are being missed by most hams.

Threat of static build up damage directly depends on the ambient humidity of
the work environment.

If it is high humidity, you will have a difficult time causing enough
friction to build up charge on a surface before it bleeds off.

The "grounding" is just to bring the work surface, your wrist, and the
components at threat, and the board, all into the same voltage potential so
that charge bleeds off any charged surface and evenly redistributes among
all the parts of the work system.   The pad should have connection thru a
resistor to the wrist strap.  The board and components should be in contact
with the pad until you get them inserted into the board.  The iron should be
grounded to the common jumper among them, so no charge is imparted from the
iron.  Sometimes you can trust an AC ground, but most are pretty poor, so I
would put more emphasis on controlling the humidity to not have any static
favorable atmosphere where you build.   In other words, in dry cold winter,
you have static buildup in Jan.   In hot muggy July, you do not.  A long AC
ground lead in the cable along side the AC hot wires would possibly induce
high voltage AC as damaging as DC static charges.
-Stuart
K5KVH