I forgot to mention, most of the lightning damage (more than 90 percent) I have had has been after long periods with no rain, so the clay had a lot of time to dry out and turn in to an insulator. One Summer my main tower and about 10 percent of my clients were destroyed from one lightning storm. It had been really dry before this storm.
Brad H On 5/24/07, Scott Lambert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
There's been a lot of talk in here about how to ground the towers. I hope everybody's actually read up on the topic, but just in case someone isn't, get a book. Don't guess. Proper grounding is hard. It's expensive. One such book is put out by PolyPhaser. It's obviously biased toward using their gear. It's only $20 and has more math than you're probably interested in. But there are a lot of little things to consider. The ARRL also has a three part series, in PDF, about lightning protection. They are free. If you want to experiment with grounded vs. ungrounded, may I suggest you put strike counters on both sets of towers? That's the only way you will know if you are just lucky, or your ground system/strategy is working. My first tower (50') was hit three times the first spring it was up. Lots of little bits and pieces of electronics to sweep up each time. We didn't know how little we knew about proper ground systems. Three ground rods and #4 ground wire ought to be great, right? Got the book. Figured out that we were doing a lot of stupid things. Went from 3 to 6 ground rods. Tweaked a few other things. It's been two years without surge related outage. No strike counter on it yet so I can't prove that the upgrades helped yet. Just to counter the "clay makes insulators", clay is the best soil you could want for a ground system. You have to bake the water out of the clay before you get an insulator. In the ground, clay hangs onto water which help conductivity. Be careful, whatever you do. -- Scott Lambert KC5MLE Unix SysAdmin [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
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