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Lightning is a pain in the butt

G

Gatekeeper007

We have been up and down a dozen times here at WLRE in two weeks signing off and disconnecting equiment to keep lightning from damaging anything. Still the tower has been hit twice in two weeks taking out the internet equiment each time even tho it was unpluged. And yes the tower is grounded and been checked with a half an ohm to ground reading. Boy I hate lightning.
 
Maybe you need a fiber-optic STL link inside the building just to keep the internet-and-wired stuff safe from the lightning.

I presume you're getting strikes on the tower, and it's finding paths to ground that are "less than ideal" for equipment life.
 
If it is not a tower strike, and it's hitting Internet equipment that is unplugged, you have three potential paths for lightning causing problems: your Cat-5 or, if you are losing stuff like modems, the POTS copper loop or through your equipment rack.

Like Tom said, first use an Fiber Optic STL to feed your transmitter. Cheap and you get opto-isolation and you eliminate one possibility.

Put lightning arrestors on your POTS line.

Ground your equipment racks to a common point.
 
Also, check out Tessco.com

They carry a lot of lightning/surge protection equipment from Polyphaser and others. You can put strike protection on everything from your Coax, Cat5, and DSL. Properly bonded to a common ground, you should be all good.
 
Gatekeeper007 said:
We have been up and down a dozen times here at WLRE in two weeks signing off and disconnecting equiment to keep lightning from damaging anything. Still the tower has been hit twice in two weeks taking out the internet equiment each time even tho it was unpluged. And yes the tower is grounded and been checked with a half an ohm to ground reading. Boy I hate lightning.
Click to expand...

Don't blame the lightning. Something is wrong with your installation.

1. The tower should be grounded heavily. Don't rely on an ohmmeter. If there is any doubt, have an electrician put some more ground rods in the dirt and cadweld them together. (The electrician will know about exothermic welds, i.e. cadweld)

2. Run some copper strap from the tower to transmitter. (Get it from Lawrence Behr Associates in Greenville, NC, or Kintronics, or Polyphasor)

3. Run some more from that strap to your electrical breaker box and to the building ground.

4. The shield of your coaxial cable (from your antenna) should run to this ground at the base of the tower, and also as it enters the building, preferably before. Since you are low power, Polyphasor will make a grounding block that you can use outside your building just before it enters the building.

5. Get a surge protector for your whole building.

Normal radio stations don't go off the air intentionally when they see a thunderstorm approaching.
 
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