RF in the Shack

[koØm]

Ah yes, the ghost of Big Daddy Roth still haunts us. (;->) An above post reminded me of the time I couldn't use an earthing rod for lightning protection so I ripped one of several old and unused cable TV lines off the building and used it as a ground wire connecting it to a neighbor's chain link fence directly below the antenna mast. Considering how long it was it made a good ground passing the light bulb test with flying colors. Light bulb test? A 150W bulb connected between the AC mains hot and outer braid of the coax lit up to full brilliance. Anyway, good luck and I say that most sincerely, you'll be happy when you banish that nasty looking rat from the shack... and send him back to Rat Shack where he belongs.

Once, I ran a lead from the radials for an indoor/porch antenna to the screw that mounts the plastic plate on the 120 vac house outlets. This was circa 1996 and I had a 486-DX2 computer running Windows 95 with 16 megs of RAM. One day while working on a Sweep Tube amplifier, my computer locked up and died. Because it was still under warranty, I had it serviced for free; the hard drive had crashed.

Weeks later, under similar circumstances, again the computer died and the hard drive had to be replaced. At that time, I had just started forming conclusions as to why the hard drives died in the same way under the same conditions but, I wasn't for-sure.

On the third occurrence, while still under warranty, the Technician said, "I cannot figure out why you keep blowing up these hard drives."

The 110 vac 3 wire plug uses 1/2 of the 220 vac service with the neutral and the ground tied together; effectively, my return path from the antenna was connected to the whole of the building wiring.

There was not a fourth RF caused hard drive failure.

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