Hi Bill

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?

In my case, it was more of a matter of what I could get at the time I
started doing this. Copper was the only thing I knew of that I could
easily braze to using copper phosphorus bronze rods and a simple low
cost propane torch. Short bolts with semi U shaped washers were used
through grounding cables because lightning could melt the brazing just
as easily as solder.

Also, my house had vertical aluminum siding and I didn't want stray RF
heating it up or causing my house to act like an antenna or someone
get burned while I was on the air by touching the house. I was a
worry wart!

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

It wasn't so much the TV's as those cheap arse cordless telephones.
When using antenna's fed with ladder line, I never messed them up.


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

NONE!
But here is the order in which I progressed over the years.
At first, I drilled hole in the copper plate, passed the coax through
the hole, cut the covering down to the shield, wrapped a copper wire
around the shield, brazed it to the copper plate, soldered to the
shield, coated with tar wrap and sprayed over all with trumpet lacquer

Later, I used a connector, don't remember the order number, like a
double SO239 and brazed all the way around it. There is about a 1db
loss using two PL259s and a joining connector.

My final setup used gas bottle lightning arrestors, one end was stuck
through the hole in the copper plate, the other end through the
drywall inside. They were just the right length for this!
The ground braid from the gas bottles went to the lower edge of the
copper plate. Silicone was coated over the outside connections.


I am not sure what this gas bottle arrester is. Are you talking about a
homebrew made from some recycled material of some kind?
No, they are store bought, the gas bottle is inside of a metal
housing. Transi-Trap is one brand name.

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....

Yep, I'm very familiar with the old Knob & Tube wiring!
I spent about 25 years remodeling older homes.
You might like to see how I get a 5 foot bathtub into a 4 foot wide
bathroom after making the tub area only 3-1/2 feet wide by covering up
the exposed vent stack. If so, check out my hidden web page at
http://archimedes.galilei.com/raiar this is my index page, it has no
link to the hidden pages, but there is a picture of this old man on
there somewhere, plus some other junk you might be interested in as
well. To get to the bathtub, behind the URL type /BATH and look for
the .html page and open it, it will bring up all the .jpg's in
storyline fashion.


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

A lot of hams disconnect their antenna's and leave the cable laying
open. This is VERY DANGEROUS as lightning, if it does come in through
the feedline will arc to the nearest ground and sometimes to many
ground points in the room. NEVER leave an unconnected feedline laying
loose in the shack. Run it to ground or toss it back outside.


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.....

No, I split the wires apart and spaced them slightly less than 6
inches apart. The plastic I beams I purchased were 12 inches long, I
cut these in half and drilled holes about 1/16 inch in from the ends.
So my wire spacing was more like 5-1/2 inches.
I have never seen much difference in spacing over 2 inches as far as
operation. I figure once you get over 500 ohms it doesn't really
matter too much after that if you are at 2000 or 10,000 ohms

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.....

There you go!
I used doubled soda straws for temporary antenna's and later replaced
the straws with 3/8 PVC.

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.....

I hear ya!

Neighbors called the fire department on me a few times and I wasn't
even on the air. But I was home all three times!

At one time I had a nice tower, a couple of large beams and a yagi all
riding aloft. I got a frantic phone call from a neighbor saying that
my antennas were on fire, just blazing away. I ran out into the
backyard and looked up, saw nothing unusual. About that time I heard
sirens blaring and they were stopping at my house. They did not see
anything amiss either.

A year later I had just pulled in the driveway, arriving home from
work, before I reached the door a fire truck came screaming down the
street and again stopped at my house. A neighbor had called them,
saying my roof was on fire. The inspected everything, including the
attic, could not find anything amiss.

About three years later, I finally saw with my own eyes what the
ruckus was about. It was heavily overcast, a mean storm was brewing.
I had just gotten off the highway and was coming down the main road
getting ready to turn onto my street. From this vantage point I could
see my antenna's and the top of my house with ease.
What I saw almost gave me a heart attack.
It was like fire was bellowing in all directions from the top of my
house. I stopped the truck on the hill down to my house and just
watched. I could discern that the fire was eminating from the tips of
each of the elements on my antenna's.
It wasn't but a few minutes that I was sitting there watching and it
was fading down and only the largest beam was still putting out a few
flashes when I heard those darn sirens. The fire truck went whizzing
right past me and pulled up at my house.
I pulled up behind them and grabbed one of the firemen and pulled him
back out to the street so he could see the last couple of flashes of
fire and then there were no more.

About two months later I get a telephone call from the fire
department, they had finally figured out what the sparks were caused
by. A phenomenon known as St. Elmo's Fire was the culprit.

I didn't have to worry about another call, because that season a
direct lightning hit to the tower caused the tower to explode and it
all came down in a heap.
Lightning hitting the tower should not have hurt anything at all, but
the legs of the tower had filled with rainwater over the years and the
lightning hit apparently turned the water to steam and blew the tower
apart. Leastwise, that was the professional inspectors assessment of
what had happened.

It turns out that in the area where I lived at the time, this was a
common occurance, especially on older homes and barns that had
lightning rods on the roofs. Not as pronounced as mine, because they
are only one point, where between my two beams, the yagi and several
tower mounted verticals, I had quite a few open ends (points) up
there. And everything was grounded to the max.

What is funny is I had lived in that same area all of my life and had
never seen anything like it before. My house was on the high side of
a long valley, just about 3 miles south of an area we call Tornado
Alley. If a thunderstorm was coming, it would run up or down the
valley and cross right over my house every single time. If it was
going to rain within a 50 mile radius, I would get wet, even if it
didn't rain on the other side of the street.
There were several times that it rained in my back yard and the front
yard never saw a drop of rain in a whole week or two.
My wife used to say it was because of all that metal I buried under
the ground in the backyard. I don't think so, but there must be some
explanation for it! I think it's simply that the front yard is on the
higher side and the backyard the lower side, where the clouds slide
down the valley.

TTUL - 73+ de Gary - KGØZP