Over my 54 years as a ham, the subject of grounding seems to have taken on a more and more elevated importance in the assembling of a ham station. When I started, there seemed to be little discussion on the topic. But over the years, there seems to be a heightened level of importance given to the subject.
If you read the current info on the subject, you must have all equipment chassis tied together at a single point, and this point should have a huge gauge wire that is very short and connected to at least one eight foot ground rod in the ground. Which is also connected via a buried cable to the ground where the utility power comes in. And you must have lightning surge protectors in line with all antennas. There are books on the subject, and it seems like all new ham advice columns and YouTube channels indicate this is all necessary to have a ham station.
Yet for over 30 years I had none of that. Some of it I still don’t. I still made contacts. I never had any equipment damaged by lightning or other scary effects of poor grounding. Putting up a decent antenna is hard enough, now I have to worry about how good my grounding is? And if I follow all of the steps that satisfy the definition of a “properly” grounded and bonded station, will that help me make more contacts?
Yet I see numerous posts, articles, videos saying you MUST do this. There doesn’t seem to be any leeway. Don’t even try to make a contact unless you do all of this first.
I understand the importance of AC power safety, lightning protection, and good RF ground. I have read numerous articles and white papers on the subject. When it comes to AC power safety, one must have some understanding of what they are doing when dealing with AC power. With lightning protection, it seems like the best practice is to disconnect antennas when lightning is in the area. Most likely, nothing will protect you from a direct hit, and maybe lightning arrestors may minimize damage from nearby strikes, but if you are disconnecting your antenna already???
RF ground is a somewhat different story. Depending on what kind of antenna you are using, it may or may not be relevant. As I mentioned, for years I used many different types of antennas with no ground at all. I never had RF in the shack, Hard to imagine it as that big of a deal.
Maybe modern equipment is much more susceptible to damage than the vintage gear I used to run. I certainly can see this as a possibility. At my current QTH, I have had a 8 foot ground rod for my station for over 20 years. It is about 20 feet below my 2nd story room where my shack is.. Nothing has been connected to it other than my station ground, via a heavy gauge ground wire from my shack. This seems to be a terrible idea according to various sources regarding grounding practices. A shack on the second floor is apparently a terrible idea. Though this had seemed to be an advantage for the previous 70 years.
I still had no issues until I put up an 80-10 End-Fed Half Wave antenna. This was an antenna of convenience, as I could have it connected to the house with a very short length of coax (maybe 10 feet). This type of antenna has very high impedance at the feed point. I never had any RF bites in the shack, but I could get some noise in my shack audio chain (an external audio amp and speaker), and on a computer in the same room, I would hear the USB disconnecting/connecting while transmitting. Not serious problems, but annoying.
I also had an issue with the virtual USB on my FTDX-101D, which I had wrote about previously. This may have been more of a Yaesu design flaw than a RF in the shack problem, but certainly an area of possible concern. https://xarc.us/2025/02/i-modded-my-ftdx-101d/
With all of that said, I wondered if maybe my grounding scheme was part of the problem? So I started researching. One thing that kept coming up was that your station should be very close to the ground rod. This seemed more than a little impractical for many people who have shacks on the second floor. Then I found this article:
This was an article I found on the Flex Radio website. It already had some weight behind it. It was written by Jose I. Calderon, DU1ANV. It included a good amount of theory backed up with some math. There was one section that discussed the situation where if one had a shack on the second floor with 20ft + of wire to the ground rod and how this can act like an antenna. This section is labeled – Alternative 2 -The RF Suppressor Ground System. It uses coaxial cable as the ground wire, with the shield shorted together at the ground rod end, and a .01mf 1000V capacitor between the shield and center conductor at the station ground end.
After about 3 years of wanting to try this out, today I finally accomplished the project. I have no idea whether it will make any difference at my station. I’m sure it will not help me make contacts. But I can be assured that at least someone might look at my setup and say “hey, those 254 countries don’t count. You don’t have a properly grounded and bonded station!”.
