Why would I need to ground my equipment ?

See my answer a few days ago from another question about how to ground your station.

There are 3 reasons to ground your station: 1) Electrical safety - so when something goes wrong, you don't get electrocuted. You do this by simply connecting the frame of everything in your shack to third prong ground, with any length wire, of a guage that will blow your breaker, so 14 gauge for 15 Amp, 12 gauge for 20 Amp. When your power supply shorts out and puts line voltage on the chassis, this safety ground will blow the breaker. This will aggravate a ground fault breaker, hams should not use them, they will trip on RF without any ground fault.

2) Lightning safety - so when a thunderstorm comes, you don't damage your equipment.
This is a pain, very hard to save your equipment from a direct strike, but you can save it from a nearby strike. The main thing to do here is disconnect everything from any connection that leaves the room - power, antenna, phone, internet, etc. Disconnect means at least a 6" gap, not just a switch. Unplug everything. Then, make sure your antenna has a path to earth ground. It should be a good solid direct path, not third prong ground, but a heavy wire going straight down or over to a ground rod, with no corners or loops in the wire. Connect this always to the shield of coaxes, and connect it to open wire feed when the antenna is not in use.

3) RF performance - if you have an unbalance antenna, you will have RF current on the ground side from the antenna tuner. This ground connection is really part of your antenna, it will most likely radiate if it has any length to it (over 5 feet). Usually this can be the same as your lightning ground, but disconnect it from the tuner when a storm comes. 3rd prong ground is almost useless for this. If you are far from ground, you simply cannot have a good RF ground at your station. Like if you are in an attic and running a longwire antenna, the ground is definitely a major part of your antenna, and it's length will make a big difference. Best to use a balanced antenna like a dipole, or a verticle antenna at the ground, fed with coax going down to ground and feeding the antenna near the ground, with a good ground rod connection at the antenna end coax shield.

Almost all VHF antennas are "balanced", even though fed with unbalanced coax. The antenna provides it's own ground, like the ground radials on a vertical or the dipole in a yagi. This is not true if you use an antenna made for car mounting, you will need to provide the equivalent of the car at the base of the antenna.

Never a short answer...

-Dan, KW2T

thanks dan

writing all that it was helpfull

Guy kc8war