Grounding of the pre-amp board 14, version 1, as it is being called on the What's New page, has a terminal explicitly for a ground. However the drawing of the board and antenna wire in a plastic protective tube (I assume PVC or Sched 40) only shows the 75 ohm coax coming out of it, no direct ground drawn in, so it is hard to know for sure. I would assume (and we all know where that gets us, that if this thing is so sensitive to interference as they say it is, the ground would be mandatory. However, it isn't grounding to protect it from the zap that will help protect the goodies indoors, I'd guess. I have had a strike to my 80 foot tower that melted through some aluminum clad coax (of course at the most inaccessible spot near the top), but the preamp connected to that coax inside is still working just fine. Go figure.
I am thinking of using an old CB whip, you know those 108 inch long things that were in the old police car movies, with the spring on the bottom, and placing it on a 4x4 post out in my woods a ways, since it says you can go up to a 100 meters through excellent quality coax back to the preamp board. That should allow me to get way out away from my pesky annoying noise sources. I wouldn't put the whole thing in a tube, just protect the little board with an appropriate water tight box, and run the lead from the antenna base spring into it. After all the beta board he showed in the picture announcing this was just a little wire soldered to a flat piece of copper.
I'd wager the houses around you would get hit first with lightning before your E-field antenna would It never hurts to make a few coils of the coax about a foot in diameter to make a little bit of an impedance bump before going into the house or shed. But as someone said with a billion volts jumping across three or four miles of air carrying large currents, it is hard to imagine that we can keep Zeus from coming into the house if he wants to.
Think of the radio towers getting hit all the time during a storm and the station stays on the air. I don't know if I'd want to be in the transmitter shack when that happens, but our local TV station has a 2000' tower that the base of is just feet away from the transmitters and a guy is in there a lot, during storms and all. More important is a good ground to drain away any build up and minimize 'attraction' as a point to get with the bolt. Finally, if you look at a lot of the older car antennas and the two-way radio antennas, they all had a little ball on top (that's why when you tuned them you trimmed the bottom, you couldn't replace the ball) which was reportedly to dissipate the static build up and minimize noise.
Just some thoughts.
Dale
(I plan on putting down a ground right at the base of this antenna, although many radio guys say an earth ground isn't an earth ground without multiple radials, etc. Better than nothing.)
I saw a big difference in my noise level when I attached a ground to my RED controller.
