Essentially, your antenna is a lightning rod. Lightning rods don't
"attract" lightning. The dissipate the charge differential between the
cloud and earth before the charge builds sufficiently to provide a path
for a "leader" charge from earth to the cloud. When a "leader" is
established, the "full charge" of a lightning strike develops. All this
assumes a properly installed system. If you are actually utilizing a
lightning rod system, it must be properly installed. This means solidly
done interconnections between rods and a properly installed heavy wire
ground. To further provide some protection, 8 foot ground rods should be
installed about every 10 feet around the perimeter of the building.
These rods should be bonded together. Ideally, one would use copper
strapping about an inch in width. That is expensive. Another possibility
is the heavy wire used by welders. The perimeter ground should be
connected to the buildings electrical service ground. Then, there should
be a minimum 8 foot long ground rod connected with that welding wire to
each leg of the tower. At guy wire anchors, ground the guy, again with 8
foot rods. Now, bond each guy-point to one another, to the tower and to
the perimeter ground at the structure housing the shack. Yes, it is a
lot of work. This is the type of installation used at the 55KW TV
station at which I was engineer many moons ago. 750 foot tower. The
safest place in a thunderstorm was in the transmitter building. The
properly installed system provided a "cone of protection" for a distance
of 750 feet around the base of the tower. Much of this info was provided
by an outfit called Lincole (if I recall the company name correctly) in
a 2 day seminar that all the station engineers had to attend. Tom, WB2KLD
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