[Elecraft] [OT] A dumb question about lightning

[Rick NK7I]

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Welcome to the Bible of grounding.   It’ll take several reads to grasp what you have to do. 

73,
Rick NK7I


> On Jul 28, 2023, at 2:11 PM, john at kk9a.com wrote:
> 
> I would recommend that you follow proper lightning bonding/grounding
> techniques, these are the only methods that work. My tower has taken a
> number of lighting strikes. You cannot prevent a lightning strike. Simply
> disconnecting your feedling will not prevent damage inside your house as the
> voltage from a strike will be induced into your home's electrical wires.
> 
> John KK9A
> 
> 
> Al Lorona W6LX wrote:
> 
> 
> Please don't laugh at me; I'm a transplant from a region of the country with
> essentially no lightning to a region where you have to worry about it quite
> a bit.
> 
> We had a doozy of a storm last night, with lots of lightning overhead. I
> felt like a sitting duck, even though I had grounded both sides of the
> balanced feedline of the antenna, switched the antenna switch to the middle
> (grounded) position, and even disconnected the coax leading to the K3's
> rear-panel antenna port.
> 
> Whenever lightning happens, I always wonder if it really is in fact better
> to ground everything. Because, doesn't that essentially make a lightning rod
> of the antenna? If I simply disconnected the antenna and left it floating,
> wouldn't it be less likely to attract a lightning bolt?
> 
> I'm of the belief that it's better to try to avoid a direct hit than to
> attract one and trust your grounding system to do its thing. I'm of the
> belief that no grounding system is perfectly effective.
> 
> Al  W6LX/4
> 
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