Minimum gauge for groud...
 

Drakefan wrote:
snip

First, the balun shouldn't be up in the air. It should be close to the
ground at the lower end of the vertical downlead wire of the inverted-L
antenna. Then you can use a short, less than three feet, length of
grounding wire from the balun to the rod. The ground wire should be at
least 10-gauge, preferably larger, like 6 or 4-gauge. The coax should
run on or in the ground to the house and then to the radio. This will
prevent it from picking up noise on the coax shield, which can happen
when the coax is up in the air. It's not absolutely necessary to ground
the coax shield again near the radio if you follow the above advice.

This is exactly the configuration that I use; it has reduced QRN considerably
in a _very_ noisy environment, but additional filtering of audio is often
needed as well.

Michael