Richard Harrison wrote:

ml wrote:
"wouldn`t my antenna then become the "best" ground or path of least
resistance and thusly ""attract"" the lightning."

That seems right and conductivity does not have to be high. Ben Franklin
found the conductivity of twine sufficient. He drained charge from the
atmosphere by placing fis kite high.

Height is shown to attract lightning bolts to grounded towers used for
various purposes. Many are hit by nearly every passing thunderstorm.
Towers take lightning bolts. They don`t always if ever discharge the
earth and atmosphere in their area to eliminate hits. They do seem to
divert strikes in their vicinity and offer some protection to their
surroundings.

I`ve spent years in broadcast plants and seen many lightning strikes. If
you build it they will come.

I went on a tour of a TV station tower site last year, and they had a
lightning suppression system that had a number of rods with a lot of
fine metal (wires?) hanging off the ends - they looked a bit like a
cheerleaders pom-pom. The individual rods hung from the sides of that
tower at various heights on the tower. Height was either 1000 or 1200
foot IIRC.

The station engineer noted that although it was still a noisy place
when a storm was approaching, it was no where as exciting as it used to be!

And yes, it did protect the area around the tower.

I was very impressed with the mechanics of a large tower, such as the
huge suspended weight/pulley system on the guy wires, The strange
elevator that takes people up to do maintenance on the tower and guy
wires, the icefall protection structures (the engineer lost a car
once), and of course the foot thick solid copper jacket coax!

- Mike KB3EIA -

"Mike Coslo" wrote

/snip/

I went on a tour of a TV station tower site last year, and they had a
lightning suppression system that had a number of rods with a lot of
fine metal (wires?) hanging off the ends - they looked a bit like a
cheerleaders pom-pom. The individual rods hung from the sides of that
tower at various heights on the tower. Height was either 1000 or 1200
foot IIRC.

And yes, it did protect the area around the tower.

- Mike KB3EIA -

Mike,

The IEEE has nearly succeeded in quashing once and for all, the last ditch
efforts of a desperate group of snake-oil salesmen pushing Early Streamer
Emission (ESE) and Charge Transfer System (CTS) phony-science. The latest
trick of these junk-science purveyors was to hire corrupt Russian scientists
to publish "findings" that the ESE/CTS systems worked. Every other lightning
expert in the world has rung-in on this already, and the theory is totally
discredited, and without merit.

That didn't stop some engineers at various plants and stations around the
world from trying the systems those CTS snake oil salesmen pushed. The
system you described on that tower is CTS. And it never worked, anywhere.
Anyone who still defends it today is too embarrassed to admit they paid
upwards of 10x the cost of proven Franklin-rod lightning systems, for a
totally discredited design that leaves them dangerously exposed to damage
from lightning (if it was the only protection system).

Jack Painter
Virginia Beach, Virginia