william, You don't ground the antenna except in some weird cases. Every antenna is actually two elements, one may be a wire or a vertical whip, and the other is often ground.
Or you can have so-called dipoles which are two identical elements end to end. The arguments about what is a real ground go on for ever, but basically if you're doing some kind of wire antenna, the radio will also have a ground connection that needs to be taken care of. You can have a wire "under" the antenna running along the ground, floor or whatever that's the same length as the actual antenna. What you'll most likely do is to run a wire from the radio's ground connection to perhaps a water pipe or even the ground conductor of the electrical system. For general receiving this will do fine. There are truly endless configuration spossible and endless discussions of them good and bad. About all you can say about antennas for sure is that most radios need one. Tom Fowle WA6IVG
