Time-Nutters-- My workshop is surrounded by tall trees (70 to 80 ft). There is no easy way to place my T-Bolt antenna above the tree-top foliage. Since choke-ring antennas do not provide much benefit for dealing with multi-path that originates from directly above the antenna I have considered putting the antenna on a 10-ft pole and mounting the pole in the top of the nearby trees so as to have the antenna just above the tree-top foliage.
However, here in north-central Florida lightning is a serious problem. In the 12 years we have lived here, 3 trees have been hit within 75 meters of my workshop building behind my house. Here is a DropBox link to a map of lightning-strike-days in USA locations: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/60102282/Lightning%20Isokeraunic%20map.JPG I have a number of VHF and UHF antennas mounted on my workshop building but when not in use, they are kept disconnected where they enter the building. I have thought about finding some way to bring the GPS RF signal into my workshop via an optical fiber interface and sacrifice the RF to optical fiber interface if lightning strikes it in a treetop but have not found a way to implement this idea. Two years ago lightning struck a neighbor's TV antenna mounted on a pole attached to the side of his house and started a fire in one of their 2nd floor bedrooms which did a lot of damage before it was put out. The tower was well grounded and the coax leading into the room was fed through a grounded lightning protector but none of these precautions prevented the fire from the lightning strike. Any list folks have ideas on this? Mike Baker WA4HFR Gainesville/Micanopy, Fla _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.