What is the best way to ground all of your shack equipment?

Hello,

Take a look at this: www.eham.net/forums/Elmers/240895

W8JI answered with a photo of the outside of his shack. I've seen that photo before, but until yesterday, I never noticed the 4" wide copper along the bottom of the siding. It's pretty weathered. It looks like he has #10 copper radials fastened to it every so often.

You should absolutely look at http://www.w8ji.com/station_ground.htm. Although there are a lot of photos of his tower legs grounded on the page, there's a lot of good info there I think you're looking for.

One thing I noticed there, though: in the photo www.w8ji.com/images/Grounding/house-grounding.jpg, there is no ground shown between B and C. However, below the photo he does say "The best solution is to bond point C to point B with a much lower impedance path than any other path. B and C should always be bonded together. This is even spelled out in the National Electrical Code."

Hope this helps you decide about your station ground.

73 Mike W0BTU

First and foremost, a ground rod 6' to 8' outside close to the feed point. Next a lightening arrestor on the coax at the feed point connected to the ground rod. Inside, attach wire from the ground points of your equipment together, and I run it to the ground screw of a electrical wall plate. AI5L

Use a 8-10 ft copper clad groundrod,then #2,3,4 Ga.stranded /solid coperwire less then 1/4 wavelenght to your grounbuss from the groundrod,a buss is a copperpipe or solid flat peace of copper stock- to this you have all your gear connected-you may use a lightning arrestor also,I do not.I just disconnect everything when a storm is in the area.Ive used arrestors before and DID Not Protect My equipment!With a proper ground you should not cause/much if any TVI/BCI,I have none and can operate 1500watts cw/ssb with no problems,a good ground will also help with swr/matching at the transceiver/antenna tuner. Good Luck -73

                     Paul K8PG

Grounding can seem like black magic, but it's not to an engineer. There are several reasons to ground things, each one pushes you in a different direction.

If you are looking for lightning safety, almost nothing helps. You get a direct hit and hundreds of volts appear across very heavy copper wire, things can still get blown up. Add to this any inductance caused by a turn in the wire will make the voltage go much higher. For lightning, best to disconnect everything from any metal that's outside, and "disconnect" means like more than 6" separation. Then make a direct path from your outside metal (antenna) to ground, with as straight a path as possible. Also make sure there is no path through your equipment, like coming in the power line and out the phone line. That's really asking for it, as when your house gets hit, the entire electrical and plumbing system might go 1000 volts above ground, but the phone and internet might still be near ground. If your equipment is a path between those two, it takes the damage.

For RF ground, like to act as a counter-poise to your antenna, or ground to a tuner with a long wire antenna, remember that a dead short to ground becomes a wide open high impedance when you have 1/4 wavelength length of wire (or 3/4, 5/4, etc). So on 40 meters, if you have a path to earth ground that is 10 meters (30 feet), it won't do you any good (other than acting as the counterpoise itself). With this seemingly nice solid ground, you can still get RF burns from touching your microphone. In my opinion, you have a better chance if you don't have an RF ground, but you have something predictable on the ground terminal of your antenna tuner, like a quarter wave wire with the far end open. Or a balanced antenna like a dipole. If your shack is in the attic, you are just not going to have RF ground, you need to use other tricks to get HF unbalanced antennas to work (like long wires).

Another reason to ground is for electrical power safety, stopping your equipment from getting voltage on it when there is a power short somewhere. This is the 3rd wire ground in outlets. This one is easier as you're worried about 60 hz only (1/4 wave is about 3000 miles), so a good solid connection to the power ground is all that matters. If you look inside your breaker box, you will see safety ground and white neutral wire connected together, but that's at the grounded neutral bar. This just allows ground fault breakers to work, but you don't want one of those on your station as RF will get down the power lines and trip them constantly, really annoying. Just make sure the frame of everything is connected to the third prong. Electrical code says your water system has to be connected to your electrical system ground, but that's for electrical safety, not for RF or lightning, so a water pipe may or may not help.

Grounding is not simple. The other answers here that say "put a xx length rod in the ground and connect it with xx wire gauge" are over-simplifying the issue, but lacking a detailed understanding of wire impedance at RF and fast rise time lightning surges, this advice might be the best way to go. Just don't be surprised if the simple solution doesn't work. The rules of thumb are as short as possible direct path to earth, with as low inductance wire as possible (wide copper strap is best, but real expensive). Multiple grounds with multiple lengths of wire to ground rods in different places is a good thing. I would connect anything metal in your shack together, copper pipes, steel I-beams, rack frames, etc, with short direct paths. Run ground wires out of your shack in opposite directions with different length wires to different ground points, this helps avoid resonances.

There are cases where you don't want ground. You don't want your body grounded when you touch something electrically hot. You don't want your scope grounded when you connect the ground lead of a scope probe to some equipment that has a different ground path. I always have a 3-prong adapter on my scope power cord to float the ground.

Feel free to ask me more specific questions, I probably already went into too much detail and confused you.

-Dan, KW2T