Outdoor antennas and Grounding

[Gregg Lengling]

If you've followed Todd's tale of woe on the off topic area regarding his loss of a bunch of gear, here's a lesson to learn.  Tood thought he did everything right....he had ground decoupling antenna feedthroughs on the back of the house that was grounded to the service entrance to remove surges off the line that might build up on the antenna.  However he was relying totally on the sheild of his coax as his grounding system.  This is dangerous and on top of that it's actually ILLEGAL. NEC (national electrical code) requires that roof mounted antennas have a separate ground conductor, not less than 12 gauge, connected from the antenna and it's mounting tripod connected to minimum 8' ground round.  Proper engineering techniques also state that you never never run ground lines parallel or with you antenna and rotor feeds.  The ground line should be kept separate and take the shortest route to ground and have a ground stake at that location (making sure you use transistion clamps if there are dissimilar metals).

Had Todd done this he may still have had damage, however I doubt it would have been as severe.  He lost 1 TV , AV Sound recievers, a couple Directv boxes, a Game box and a replay recorded.  I haven't added it all up (I did damage estimates for his insurance co. today), but I would guess in the area of 2.5 to 3.5Kbucks.  Ouch...thank God for homeowners/renters...yeah renters if any of you are renters it's just as important to have insurance.

Well on the bright side Todd can run out and start buying some new toys, well actually Michelle beat him to that, she already went out and bought a PlayStation II today.  

Anyways it's was sorta nice to put a face to at least one of the gang on here and it turns out the company that Todd works for is a Client of mine....well isn't that nice.

See you all in 1080i 16:9 5.1DD....


------------------
Gregg R. Lengling
RCA P61310 61" 16x9
glengling@ameritech.net

[Matt Heebner]

After hearing about Todd, and now reading your post....I have to admit...I put my dish up myself and I do not have it grounded. At the time I was having enough trouble with the wiring run that I didnt have time for proper grounding. Well...next weekend I am going to install a grounding rod and get everything up to "spec" with my dish. I probably have been living on borrowed time but now is the time to "get correct".
Hpefully I never have to deal with what Todd has had to deal with (although it wouldnt be soooo bad to upgrade!)

Matt