In article , John Barnard
wrote:

Is there much one can do for sensitive electronics? For example, during the
summer at my QTH, late day thunderstorms are common and on one such day I
did have the antenna disconnected from my Drake R-8B but a FET still managed
to get fried and I needed to send the radio back to Drake for repair.

I You do not know what happened. The radio might have been damaged
before you disconnected it. Sometimes the damaged FET does not fail
right away. There might have been a static charge on the antenna that
blew the FET when you went to reconnect it.

I consider myself very fortunate that I do not live in a lightening zone
and so do not have these problems but I do not use the type of antennas
most susceptible to this kind of damage.

Loop antennas are the safest to use as long as you make ground contact
first with the radio upon reconnection. If you use a Marconi type of
antenna, be sure to use a coupling transformer that is grounded in some
way to give the static charge a place to go.

The damaging pulse from lightening needs some kind of clamping device.
Those can be bought at the same outfits that sell antennas.

--
Telamon
Ventura, California