Club Program Ideas: Grounding the tower

In this series on Club Program ideas, I’m providing possible programs for clubs to use in their meetings. You can find a full explanation of the approach in Club Programs – The Series.

Today’s program idea: grounding the tower.

While yesterday's grounding topic was the station, today we extend that idea outside to the tower.

Grounding the tower will go a long way to protecting the station -- and the rest of your household electrical items.

Possible program subjects:

• Lightening myths
• The role of concrete and rebar in lightening protection
• How many grounding rods you need
• How to maintain the grounding system
• Welding the wires -- why it is needed.

When I belonged to the Four Lakes Amateur Radio Club in Madison, WI, we were fortunate to have a 40,000 student University in town. Along with the professors. We had a great lightening protection program done by one of the professors.

His great theme was busting the lightening protection myths with this simple question: do you think lightening traveling five miles will be stopped by X? Fill in whatever for X and you can see where he was coming from.

Bonus: do one program on the myths and the theory of protecting the tower. Do another program on the practical how-it-is-done part of the work.

Scot, K9JY