[Elecraft] [OT] A dumb question about lightning

[Walter Underwood]

Lightning can’t tell whether something is grounded because the energy pulse hasn’t gotten that far yet.

Lightning induces a current in every nearby conductor. When that pulse of current reaches a building or electronics, we want to provide a low impedance path to a safe sink (ground rods) and a high impedance path to the equipment (a choke). A lightning arrestor is a temporary low impedance path to ground for conductors that aren’t normally grounded.

The best high impedance path is disconnecting your equipment. That won’t stop a direct strike, because that will induce currents in the disconnected equipment. But it will help almost all the time.

wunder
K6WRU
Walter Underwood
CM87wj
http://observer.wunderwood.org/ (my blog)

> On Jul 28, 2023, at 1:31 PM, Al Lorona <alorona at sbcglobal.net> 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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