Hi Gary,

That is some vivid and colorful experience you describe there.

I haven't ever heard anything like that gounded copper "face" plate at
the entry point to the house. What is the theory there? If it wants to
arc it goes to ground?


I don't know whether my system is considered right or wrong, but it
has worked for 20 years with no problems at all and no TVI.


I am glad to hear that, since I do have a few neighbors here.


On the wall outside of my shack is a 1/16" thick copper plate that
measures about 14" x 18" A #6 braided copper cable, brazed along the
left edge, along with 3 bolts through it as well, connects to an 8
foot grounding rod with clamps. It is through holes in this copper
plate that all wires lead into the shack.


What kind of insulators did you install in that copper plate for the
wires to go through?


On the inside of the house, a section of drywall was removed from
between the studs temporarily, in order to install 9 gas bottle
lighting arresters inside the wall.

I am not sure what this gas bottle arrester is. Are you talking about a
homebrew made from some recycled material of some kind?


"I have handled ladderline in a couple of different ways over the

years. Initially, I passed my ladder line, one leg through each of
the 3/4 PVC tubes and on the inside to my tuner, on the outside to the
antenna it was used with, in this case a loop skywire.


your use of the pvc tubes is not that different my intended use of those
old ceramic tubes, It just happen to have saved a bunch here at the farm
and have a bucket full of them. They were used to run the ac wires
through wooden chicken house walls, you know they left those lights on so
the chickens would lay more eggs....there were an awful lot of these
lights running along to 100' long chicken houses. I have spent many years
dismantling and remodelling these old buildings. Now we only have a half
dozen chickens and that is even too many..hi hi...what were we talking
about,,,,oh yes....ladder line....



As an aside, I had a similar set-up at my former house, only without
the gas bottle lightning arresters. Then I would use connectors
through the copper plate which grounded the braid to the copper plate.


I am in K6 here, not much lightning, however, I think I will put a big
old knife switch in

In places where it is feasible, I prefer ladder line over coax!
One of the best ladder lines I ever constructed was using some of my
sons Monster Cable that he had used with his stereo speaker system.
This heavy cable for some reason made a noticable difference in how my
80 meter loop skywire functioned. Bandwidth was definately greater,
and many received station signals were stronger. Logical NO, but they
were.


Are you saying that you made your ladderline out of monster cable
(braided #12 or so) by separating the two stands and keeping the
insulation on it and using spacers? Or are you saying you used monster
speaker cable "as is" for ladder line (those two strands would be kind of
close that way, maybe that gave you a favorable impedance in that
situation. I am trying to get the picture. I do have a bunch of that
cable on hand as well and never even gave it a thought as applying to ham
radio....it fits into my audio and speaker building hobby.....


As an aside, I often used miniature plastic I-Beams from the hobby
shop instead of wood for my spacers.

yes, the search for good spacers.....I am thinking of using those small
dia. uv/pvc tubes (4") that are used as ferrules for rain gutter spikes.
The company is sending me a bad of 250 without the spikes for a nominal
price....samples you know.....

I don't why I am so fixed on this ladder line idea...maybe because I want
to design one of those old fashioned qsl cards with a cartoon of a
chicken house ham shack up on a hill with a cartoon latter line going up
to a wire antenna with old fashioned glass strain insulators etc.....dah,
di dah, di dah dah dah being pounded out on a log drum.......with sparks
flying out to all points in the ionosphere.....

73 Bill k6taj