I swear to the Ether in the heavens above, I have never gotten so many whacky responses to any article I have written, as I have for my article "Grounding Systems for Amateur Radio Stations!

Most Hams it seems just don't get the point, so I will try again. If you have an electrically balanced antenna up in the air for any band above say 10 Megacycles, how are you going to get it connected to ground anyway? A quarter wavelength for 10 MHz. is about 23 feet long. Soooooo, 23 feet away from ground is an infinitely high impedance! At half that distance the AC impedance is in the hundreds of Ohms!

Some say they want to install a ground system as a cure for television interference or TVI. I say, how do you think an RF ground will help this? If you have a nice resonant antenna on 28 MHz, and its up at some decent height in the air. ITS SECOND HARMONIC IS STILL AT 56 MHz., RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF CHANNEL 2 TELEVISION! Rather than putting in a ground system, put a high quality flipping Low Pass Filter on the output of your transmitter! Let the flipping neighbors put a good quality High Pass Filter on the antenna input connections of their TV set, and forget about it!

Now, if you are a 160 Meter fan, well, maybe you should install a good RF ground. So, thats one band, 200 KHz. wide, in 23,471 MHz. of Ham spectrum! In other words .85 of 1% of that spectrum. Our less than one percent of a reason to lend the motivation for installing a good RF ground. Knock yourself out!

Don't get me wrong! A ground system can be a good thing! But, think about why you want to install one, and will it do your station any good? Think!