If you are going to go to the expense of trying to keep the lightning out of your shack and your radio - you need to do several things.

The first is the use of something called Polyphasers - Although I have talked to the man who founded the company and he seemed like a real bung hole - he did have many valid points and his equipment is used here exclusively for the install of CELL Towers.

In the world of towers - there is a formula of how to expect lightning strikes.
With a 350' tower - you can expect on average 2 strikes per a year and a catastropic strike once every 4 years.

When I say catastropic - I mean a lightning strike which does about $40,000 of damage.
When you add it all up, it averages about $6,000.00 per a strike.
There is also something called the big 7 - that is 7 people who owns 1000 or more cell towers each.
Their maintenence bill is something in the order of about $36.5 million dollars per a year - due to lightning strikes.

The things that we do to subdue lightning strikes is covered under the Motorola codes for towers. It's a simple formula
We bond everything in the candleabra - each antenna carries it's own ground.
Every 30 feet down the tower - the heliax gets connected / bonded to a ground along the ladder mount.
At the bottom of the tower - each coax ( Heliax) gets bonded to ground.
Before it goes into any type of transmitter building, it gets bonded to a ground.

Each leg of the tower is bonded to a ground.
There is a loop around the transmitter building and tower with stakes spaced evenly all around and sometimes a wire mesh is placed under the tower and around the building to absorbe the lighting and displace it.
Everything gets bonded to the grounds by way of thermal welded joints - Cadweld. All of the equipment inside of the transmitter building is cadwelded to the ground and the electrical service is also bonded to all the other grounds.

The towers here - are not ran off of the consumer power lines.
It is attached to a battery bank and the battery bank is connected to the power supply. Even if the power goes out - there is enough power to run the tower two more days. If after that the power does not come back on - there is provisions to switch service to a different tower or to connect the battery bank to alternate power sources - generators.

These standards - called R 56 is not written in stone - but is pretty much the industry standards for cell tower construction.

http://lightning-protection-institut...f%20damage.htm

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