The alternative to disconnecting everything is to design your ham
station to tolerate lightning events.
There was a very good 3 part series in QST for June, July and August of
2002 that dealt with the design of a station for lightning protection.
Those articles are available at
http://www.arrl.org/lightning-protection. I highly recommend it.
Some of the "ground rules" given in the article:
All towers and masts grounded with buried radial wires and ground rods
to spread the impact of a strike over a large area of the earth.
Perimeter ground wires around any building with a driven ground rod at
each place the wire changes direction. (lightning likes to travel in a
straight line).
Bring all services into the ham shack through a common grounded copper
panel fitted with suppression devices - that includes feedlines, power,
CAT5 cables, phone cables, and everything else.
Keep any equipment or devices that are not powered/connected through the
above panel out of reach of the operating position.
There is no guarantee that the above steps will eliminate failures due
to lightning, but it will go a long way toward achieving that goal. The
real goal is to keep *everything* in the shack at the same potential
during a lightning event.
I have attempted to use those guidelines in the construction of my shack
and antenna field. All my feedlines are automatically grounded when the
station is turned off, and I do not attempt to operate when there is
lightning nearby - and I get stay out of the shack during storms.
We had a lightning event here last year that took out the Ethernet
router, several switches, 3 computers and 2 network attached printers.
None of the ham gear was damaged.
73,
Don W3FPR
On 7/15/2014 7:12 AM, Brian Alsop wrote:
This sounds like good advice. However, every connector socket on my
K3 is populated, ditto the computer, ditto the KPA500, ditto the KAT500.
Pulling all wires when there is a potential storm threat is totally
impractical. Even if I did, I'm sure some of the connectors would
simply not last.
I suspect others have similar situations.
73 de Brian/K3KO
n 7/15/2014 10:58, Bill Blomgren (kk4qdz) via Elecraft wrote:
And another warning: Nearby (like next door) lightning will be
picked up by ANY long wires which end up acting as antennas.
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