Lightning Preparations.

Lightning Preparation.
The half wave is up in the garden, and I was doing my usual earth spiking the pole, when it started raining hard and BANG! a lightning bolt hit a power line post in the field behind me some 200m away.

First thought? Sh** the rig is still plugged in!
Back inside to "Did you hear that?" from SWMBO, I ripped the aerial lead out of the SWR meter.

I knew lightning was forecast this week and blitzortung was running on the laptop BUT (and I know we're all guilty of this), there was a delay between good intentions (unplugging the aerial lead and finishing the earthing), and going shopping for those important things in life, i.e. FOOD!

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents states that ’30-60 people are struck by lightning each year in the UK, 3 (5-10%) of these strikes are fatal.’

Not much to worry about on a personal level is there ?
Only I've got a question.
How much did your setup cost you?

And finally the good news.
The rig is still working!

I've been guilty of neglecting to unplug my rig when it's forecast. I should be more careful. My mast is earthed with 4 foot length of stainless rod driven into the ground and a heavy gauge length of copper wire fixed.
Thanks for the timely reminder, it's that time of year in South Australia. I reckon a direct strike would fry every single component within a radio... possibly even the operator if you were unlucky enough to be holding the microphone at the time.

I've heard salting the ground at the earth stake works well to improve the earth.

Glad to hear you got away with that one.

As I type, there was a cluster of grief to the South of us but it looks like they are fizzling out.
Needless to say, the lightning monitor is set to VERY LOUD clicks.

Keep safe
Paul Gray

I've heard that if you go up on a hill, stand in a bucket of water and hold your aerial up in the air you can increase your tx power,

26uk81 wrote:

I've heard that if you go up on a hill, stand in a bucket of water and hold your aerial up in the air you can increase your tx power,

Thats true, you may increase your power by about 30 million volts with about 30,000 amps behind it.
Unfortunately most of that power is purely input.

Hotel Zulu 253 wrote:

26uk81 wrote:

I've heard that if you go up on a hill, stand in a bucket of water and hold your aerial up in the air you can increase your tx power,

Thats true, you may increase your power by about 30 million volts with about 30,000 amps behind it.
Unfortunately most of that power is purely input.

Quick way to boil the water tho lol.

That's why when I was more outdoor active with my old manpack builds, I used to check forecasts before I decided what antennas to carry broken up and which sling out kite items to use. When you're messing with what's essentially the best path to earth in open fields and up high territory, you learn to respect lightning and electrical storm activity.

I've seen an entire power pylon (I mean those huge main types the carry the main grid overheads) and a KM or two of cable vapourise when the pylon got hit, and they were about as earthed as you get.

Hell, if that strike had hit a manpack huge collinear whilst walkabout, you and rig and collinear would have literally have become a quantum state that technically existed, just after you got lit up like the Sun.

I doubt I'll ever see that pylon incident happen again, and will be really paranoid to the nth degree if I did see it happen twice.

Got the T shirt ?.

No - not quite yet, but I've definitely accumulated some psychological and physical scars along my outdoor portable op travels, more RF burns than I'm comfortable remembering and get pretty good at judging the warning signs of what can easily be a rapid weather change.

I've ended up, trying to avoid being a human lightning conductor, finding abandoned cliff and hillside buried observation posts that people have forgotten. Mind you, I did find some interesting items during those shelter from the storm times.

Lightning, and other forces of nature when they go nuclear in their extremes, are something you rapidly learn to respect like just how fragile your mortality is. Everyone laughs about some obsessions about solid grounding, but when you've seen what can happen when a living being becomes the best fast path to earth - you sure go out of your way to avoid becoming the fast path to earth. I'm pretty sure part of my health issues came as a residual consequence of shocks, over exposure to EM at very high FD (self inflicted in truth), and bit of accidental contact with the oxides etc from fried semicons that I later found had very toxic heavy metals and sometimes mildly radioactive constituents.

In fact, I actually question how I survived this far at times. It wasn't luck or by design, that's pretty certain.

But like all this stuff, if you learn from it you're better for the experience - at least you can be a very reliable witness to how these things can creep up on you and kick you in the dangly bits hard so to speak.

Major storms happening tonight here in my little corner of N.C. USA. Lots of lightning and thunder happening at this very moment. Radio gear unplugged and disconnected. Lights in house flickering off and on. Going to be a long night with lots of rain and flash floods happening. Seems to be a lot of that happening here these days.

Well, regardless of how you take preventative measures - some unavoidable hard realities are pretty set in stone :-

1) Equipment disconnected is highly resistant and very but not 100% immune to direct (shell, chassis, feeder or antenna) hits as there are aspects were even the emitted EM coming from a momentarily charged struck antenna can induce enough of a field density higher than what the equipment (Rx side) was designed to handle.

2. Power deprived (as in fully or worst case, discon from power bar internal backups for memory/RTC) rendering passive your gear adds a major degree of immunity as it renders the circuitry 98%+ passive so you don't find any EM induction both imprinting itself modulation-like on the low voltage and low tension feeds and sources.

3. Isolation and rendering passive of the gear will essentially (where other unfortunate inductive paths being a cause of damage in high EM momentary conditions) combine and kill probability to the extent it's like a comparison to electrically sucking away the EM the way cascaded cavity filters do isolate.

Now it's still possible for damage to occur to the ultra-sensitive discrete stuff like the PN layers in semiconductors, but that'll transpire into ways that create noticeable instabilities of an intermittent manner when you later re-fire up the gear.

Back in the day, when open ladder/window transmission lines were used, a double knife switch was adequate enough isolation as you could isolate the equipment at GND and feed as it was a balanced feed, so either a knife switch clean break across both halves or rerouting the TL to your active lightning conductor gave an added lightning conductor element made from the TL and isolated antenna as a commoner pair.

Of course, and for pop-up transportable and portable gear, you could stow your disco nected gear in a metal grounded bigger storage box, prepped/paranoid anti-EMP style if you wish as it would highly improve the most unlikely yet PITA scope for residual intermittent faults resulting from a direct or EMP strike.

Lightning, sadly, can be beautiful and deadly and both destroy electronics by EM induction and direct transmission with equal ease of effort, so more is always better when it comes to prep and precaution.

I don't get all paranoid prepped, but I do pull backup power of my gear when I passive it as a precaution and if I need to be Rx in the loop still, a cheapie receiver self-contained keeps me in the 'knowing what is happening' loop.

I'd rather spend half an hour doing a reconfig of settings lost than chasing tangible and intermittents and scrambled backup memory.

FFS doing my head in.

Good comments above on the dangers of lightning-induced EMF’s into equipment. Remember that it doesn’t necessarily require a direct hit to damage your radios. 

For many years I used to deal professionally with the subject of lightning and surge protection in general in the radio communications market-places in North America and Europe, and heard some really scary stories!

Blown up my fax machine years ago down the phone line and many cordless phones.
BT did all sorts but never sorted it out.
Don't live there now so somebody new has the problem.

Only had one brush with a lightning strike, 6 years ago hit my small Summer shack in the forest, or I should say, close to the building, saw a flash in side and bad smell , came from the sauna area of the building, very bad storm that day, but could not see any damage, we ran out to sit in the car.

Oh, and the A99 was fine and no damage to any radio, TV and so on.

Can hear some distant rumbles here at the moment, and I know it's not my tummy. Twigs are in the loft, so don't think as much of a concern as those who have high up outside, but still disconnected the radios anyway. A long time ago after a nearby strike a friend found he had lost a receive on the single channel he had left his Stalker IX on afterwards. Don't know how or why that should be, or if it was the result of the lightening or not, but not risking leaving mine plugged in.

Yes, I unplug when ever I leave the house during Summer time

There are a few apps these days for Storm tracking, I use 1,works very well, Maxmountainworld on YT gave me the name and link to it.

What's the app called Glenn? I might have a look.

I had access to a lightning tracking website not long ago that was really good, you could zoom in on the map and pinpoint strikes with great accuracy. That particular website was a subscription set-up.
I was looking for something similar but free only the other night but can't find anything nearly as good... ill keep looking.

My equipment was unplugged a couple of nights ago as we had a lightning storm pass over, to be honest I probably should have unplugged it all many hours earlier.
I might try to get into the habit of unplugging every time I'm finished using it, especially this time of year.