Manual labor from the past few days...

Some day, I'm going to get too old for this kind of foolishness. It's been really hot (hey, it's July). I've been sweating so much, my clothes are dripping within an hour. I've been going through gallons of Gatorade, and my hands have callouses on them. But (yes!) I'm done with the outside work, and tomorrow I can begin on the inside part of the job. One of the hardest parts of the project was burying the 70 feet of cable across the back yard. Virginia dirt is hard and heavy. Digging a trench through thick grass roots with a hand shovel is more difficult than it looks. I put the radio feedlines inside garden hose, and put the hose inside steel pipes. The steel pipes will hopefully keep the burrowing groundhogs from cutting through the lines. The hose keeps the radio cables dry, because the inside of buried pipes gets moist and damp. I drilled holes in the pipes to let the water drain. Lots and lots of digging. Gray hair and pot bellies don't mix well with shovels. Below: the lightning arresting system. One thing I've learned from my 32 years of radio work: be nice to lightning and lightning will be nice to you. A lightning bolt is trying to get into the earth. If you provide it with a nice, quick, easy, low-resistance path to get into the ground, the bolt would prefer take that path than go through radio equipment, computers, and other stuff inside the home. If you don't provide such a quick easy low-resistance path, well, lightning will find its own way into the ground, and the path it chooses may be one that you don't like. Here is my lightning arrestor box, about halfway through construction. That's a solid copper bus, with four gas-discharge tube arrestors mounted on it. I had to drill the holes for the cables into the fiberglass box, mount the box on the wooden posts, put the posts in the ground, and of course, pound in the eight-foot ground rod underneath. It took almost half an hour with a sledgehammer to get the rod down. Each cable had to be individually installed, mounted, fastened, and a connector soldered. Four cables out the top go to the antenna array, and four cables out the bottom go to the radio shack. Each cable had to have connectors on the other ends, too! And there are two splice connections on all four antenna cables. It takes about ten minutes per connector. Here is one of the cables, cut and prepared for the installation of the connector. A close-up of the actual ground rod. Well, one of the ground rods. I'm using three rods. The red wire here ties this rod to the other two. This rod will hopefully provide the easiest route for a lightning bolt to get into the earth. I built the HF G5RV antenna from scratch, using 300-ohm ladder line as the tuning match section. I spliced in the coax adapter, and screwed the ladder line to the a wooden 6x4 (yep, more digging!). Notice that this cable just goes right into the ground. I didn't use pipe here, since groundhogs don't (yet) dig out in the middle of the yard. The antenna lines come into the top of the box and run down through the arrestors. Hopefully a lightning bolt will leave the cables here, get onto the copper bus, and follow the ground wire down through the center of the box to the ground rod underneath. (Click on the picture to see the details... nice shiny connectors, eh?) The cables out the bottom go to the radios (the cable bundle on the far right goes into the radio room). So why the coils in the picture below? Just to take up slack? No, there's a very good reason for the coils. Lightning doesn't like to go around circles. (The explanation has to do with the physics of amperage, induced magnetism, and inductive impedence.) So by constructing circles and coils in the radio cables, I'm encouraging lightning to take the straight path down into the ground rod, and discouraging it from continuing on the radio cables into the radio room. In other words, the coils politely ask a lightning bolt to "please get off the cable here and go down the ground rod rather than continue on to the radio room". Here is a photo of the finished and installed G5RV antenna. You have to look closely to see it. Click on the photo below and look for the thin white wire going diagonally across the sky. The antenna is actually way across the yard, about 80 feet distant, and is nowhere near the wooden playgym you see in the foreground. The antenna is 35 feet high. The ends are supported by kevlar line to my wooden telephone poles. I haven't tested it out yet: I've got to get the inside of the radio shack set up this coming week before I can get back on air. Not shown are the other antennas for the VHF and UHF bands.