Lightning Strike Protection

[KX4QC]

Disconnect and ground it. ARRL insurance.

Ok, that said, what else do I do? What do you do?

I have a big, high offset dipole with a remote tuner that is just asking to be hit. -And was!

What went wrong, and what's better now?
Grounding was just 3 x 8-foot rods, now 8 rods around the house, and joined to the domestic appliance grounding.
A heavyweight Gas discharge with capacitor (Polyphaser) is now connected to the grounding system.

Convenient disconnect and grounding of the antenna and the remote tuner is shown:

ant_tuner_knifesw_crop_sm.jpg

These switches came from Amazon:
Antenna: TWTADE Disconnect Knife Switch 63A 220V 2 Pole Double Throw DPDT Power Disconnect Switch HK11-2P-63 ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0B2W2RSN1
Tuner: 32A 4 Pole Double Throw Knife Switch, PA ABS Material Home Industrial Circuit Breaker Knife Switch ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0B9MY1846

There are lots more available switches like these, so see what you like...

Connections:
Antenna: Safe - Antenna disconnected and shorted to ground. Operate - antenna connected to rig.
Remote Tuner (Icom AH-730): Safe - 4-core control cable from tuner shorted together and all cores disconnected from rig. (Like this, the rig's internal tuner works instead. If the cores are grounded at the switch, the rig's tuner doesn't work.) Operate - all 4 cores connect through to the 4-pin Tuner Molex on the rig.

[KX4QC]

Until we got hit with a direct strike, I had a home-built relay to disconnect and ground the antenna. The grounding was just tree rods that were not joined to the domestic ground. Do better than this. See the ARRL Bonding and Grounding book, or anyway use many grounds around the building and make sure that hey are joined to the domestic ground. After the Event, my grounding now complies with a total of 8 x 8' rods that are joined securely to the domestic ground. The protection best gas cartridges aren't worth diddly without good grounding. The resistance to ground should be under 20 ohms, under 10 if you can arrange it.

How to measure ground resistance? Not as obvious as it might seem: Either use the ARRL Antenna Book as a gide or take a look at
https://www.hioki.com/us-en/learning/u ... ers_3.html or to go into more detail,

https://electrical-engineering-portal.c ... -electrode

And if you like videos:



Maybe a homebrew disnnect relay or a Paradan relay-gas tube, such as:
https://paradanradio.com/products/antenna-disconnect
available as single or dual versions. I think I need one!

And don't forget that warning and detection also have a place. Take a look at viewtopic.php?p=303#p303