"Richard Clark" wrote in message
...
On 24 Feb 2008 19:57:16 GMT, "Ed_G"
wrote:

True, but rather impractical for most hams, I suspect.

Hi Ed,

The risk of life is a major issue of practicality.
Let's take that to be a fact and proceed to another common action that
is frequently taken. Let's say you are having problems with noise in
your rigs, or strange modulations riding on your signal, or tuning
issues. You might reach for the antenna connector behind your tuner.
The tuner is strapped to ground, and the cable's coaxial shield
supplies this ground to that remote drive point.

As you lean over the tuner, you hold it with one hand, you grab the
coax connector shell, unscrew it and as it separates from the jack
connection the ground currents seek the path formerly through the coax
shield and instead travel through you, hand to hand - across the
heart, and you are killed.

Where do we send the flowers?

p.s. By the way, all those problems I described that caused you to
remove that connector? They come from poor grounding exactly as
described.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC


Something like this hapened at a repeater. The power company had lost its
neutral comming into the repeater building. The antenna was going to be
changed out and when the man on the tower unhooked the coax from the antenna
(up around 100 feet on the tower) he got a bad shock. Good thing he had on
a good full body safety harnnes.

The only ground was the tower ground as the ground wire from the meter or
fuse box had been taken off. All the power had been comming through the
coax from the repeater cabinet to ground.