Earlier thread:
http://www.eham.net/ehamforum/smf/index.php?topic=75231.0

See also Lightning Protection for the Amateur Radio Station -- Part 2
QST July 2002, pp. 48-52
http://www.arrl.org/files/file/Technology/tis/info/pdf/0207048.pdf

There are commercial protectors available for open wire line, and some homebrew solutions,* but I think I'd choose one of these tactics
- Throw the open wire line out of the house and ground it below the feed point when not in use.
- Put the balanced tuner on the ground outdoors some distance from the house, making for a practical ladder line/OWL run between antenna and tuner. Put open wire line protectors where the ladder line enters the tuner (might be a waste of time). Ground the tuner itself well. Now no ladder line enters your house, just 50 ohm coax and control lines, which you put the same protectors on in your entry box as your other coax and control cables.

I would never want ladder line/OWL to enter the house in a thunderstorm. In the first tactic, a direct strike will turn both the dipole and feed line into a spray of hot copper and plasma. In the second tactic, the same thing will happen and perhaps kill your tuner, but hopefully not kill your house and shack.

If you live in a place with dry vegetation or much lighting, I'd take down the whole antenna whenever not operating.

*: Note that when you tune a balanced feed line across many bands on full power, you could have some pretty high voltages where the ladder line enters the tuner. This could easily surpass the clamping voltage of commercial protectors. Homebrew alternatives include air gaps created by grounded cylinders around each lead of the feed line.

The probability of a nuclear or radiological threat is low, but it's a contingency that should be planned for. Thankfully, many of the preparations for dealing with a low scale nuclear or radiological attack would be useful in case of a nuclear plant accident, tornadoes, chemical spills, etc.
North Korea doesn't represent a threat to hardened targets in the contiguous United States, but what if they put a couple of small devices on a civilian plane or ship, and directed it at civilian population centers? While the ICBM is the preferred delivery method of the principal nuclear powers, it's not the only way to use it.
Not for lack of trying, but it seems they are preoccupied with keeping Assad in power in Syria these days.
That depends on the political stability of all countries with nuclear weapons. Other powers might feel forced to intervene if nuclear stockpiles are perceived to be out of control in a coup or other unstable domestic situation .

A K-3 certainly looks easier to use than something like an FT-857 or IC-7000, which are heavily menu driven. The K-3 seems to have most functions right there on the front panel.

The advice to spend just as much money and effort on your antenna system as your transceiver is good advice, over time, but it doesn't all have to go on the same antenna. Perhaps you can get a selection of antennas - some vertical, some horizontal, some directional, some omni-directional, so you can choose the right antenna for the "job".

While section 97.317 contains the standards for certification of amateur amplifiers, including the 15 dB gain limit, sub-paragraph 97.315 (b) (3) seems to say that if the manufacturer, importer or dealer makes sure that they only sell to licensed hams, the amplifier doesn't need certification - just like if the ham built it themselves.

As I understand it, this makes it easy to market amplifiers that are gain-limited and CB-blocked, since they can sell them to anybody, but it also makes it possible to sell higher performance amplifiers to verified hams; the tradeoff is that it takes a bit more of due diligence and record keeping to sell non-certified amplifiers legally.

That depends on the size of the club membership and what activities you take part in. Is the station under-utilized today and collecting dust? Do you run classes, do contests, JOTA?

Do you have more operating positions than antennas? If it's impossible to use all the radios at once because there are no antennas available for them all, it might be a good idea to get more antennas, or perhaps give/sell some equipment to another club. Perhaps a school or a disabled person could borrow some equipment?

In my view, it's impossible for a station to be "too awesome", and I get a real kick out of the ex-military bases or broadcast sites are used as ham stations today, but of course it would be a shame if it sits unused.

PS: The club station information pages on your website seem to not work at the moment.

On question 1, I don't have a metal desk but if you choose to bond it you don't need to use CADWELD (thermite welding) on ground connections indoors. CADWELD is mainly recommended for buried connections, or at least outdoor connections, where corrosion is more of an issue.

How about an ESD table mat? Could that be an idea if you're annoyed by static jolts and headphone pops or do a lot of electronic work?

On question 2: You should connect both the coax shield and the center conductor to ground, as near to the ground plate as possible. The glass jar is not thick enough. "Floating" feed lines is a bad idea in lightning. So either connect the coax to ground, or disconnect both ends, and perhaps even take the coax out of the shack.

In addition to what's been said by others, the ground rods should probably be outside the drip line of your house. In other words, it should be far enough out for the rain to keep the ground wet. If you live in the desert, that might not be a concern.

Electrical safety, lightning and RF yes. I'd add ESD and EMP as grounding applications that need to be considered at some sites. The demands are different, but they overlap to some degree. For example, a good EMP ground system is often good a good lightning ground system, but a system that handles lightning well could actually make EMP pick-up worse than no ground system. A good ESD ground is bonded to the rest of the safety ground system, but it should actually have some impedance to reduce the discharge current, so it comes with built-in resistors.

You might need more than one extra ground rod. It depends on how lightning prone your structure is, and the ground resistance. A tower might need to have both surface radials for RF return currents, a ground ring, and a buried radial system for lightning dissipation. The latter would be made with much heavier wire than the RF radials, and would be detuned by design.

Surface radials would be for a vertical antenna. For an off center/end fed antenna one could get good results with radials, counterpoise wire, or an "artificial ground" in the shack.

If you ground your equipment and it causes RF, I suggest that your RF ground is not good enough yet, or that you need a better RF choke or balun.

For electrical safety grounding, you might not actually need a connection to Earth. You only need all conductive surfaces in reach of a human being to be connected to each other, so they're at the same potential.

In practice though, electrical safety ground is often connected to actual Earth, especially in wet rooms like kitchens and bathrooms, since copper pipe and the water itself conducts to Earth, or in concrete buildings where the concrete and rebar are connected to Earth.

If your shack is in a room with bare concrete walls or floor, water pipes, etc. your equipment should probably be grounded to Earth for the sake of personal safety.

If your shack is on the third floor of a wood building, it might be enough to just make sure that all the equipment grounds are bonded together. This is both for your own safety, and to protect the equipment. If you connect two pieces of electronic equipment together without bonding them together with ground strap or coax first, a static discharge or stray current could start flowing in the signal cable and overload the electronics.

If you have a third floor wood building station, with a dipole, it might be better to use balanced feed line into a tuner than using coax, perhaps augmented by an artificial ground box. As long as the equipment is bonded together in the station, your RF and safety ground needs are taken care of without any connections to actual Earth. Such a station is not well protected from lightning though. The ladder line should be taken out of the house whenever not in use.

PS: Note that in the discussion above, Earth and ground are not always synonymous. For example, at UHF a cookie sheet might be a good RF ground, without being connected to Earth.

Yes.
I doubt that but if you knock on my door to show me your rod, I'd be likely to show you the door.

A wood wall is not a magical artifact. How the coax is brought to the entry point will matter - too close proximity to the house will cause induction and arcing to wires and other conductors in the house. The walls themselves can conduct too. And proper bonding of the tower ground to the house ground system will also matter, as will the ground rods.

Lighting has a fast rise time - not slow. Its AC/RF component is substantial. As far as I know only an EMP would have a higher dV/dt than lightning.

Wait. Hold the phone. Are you seriously suggesting that one could just lay the coax on the ground, then bring the coax inside the house, and run it THROUGH the house to the AC service entry, and then back to the station? Or hang the coax along the exterior wall? Without any ground kits or suppressors between the tower and the AC service entry?

I'd put it to you that in a real sense, the AC service entry is no longer your antenna entry. Your actual antenna entry is where the coax comes near the house, and it is an ungrounded antenna entry point.

Please correct if you meant something else.

As WB6BYU points out, the common 100 watt radios you can buy already contain several stages of amplifiers. There is of course no difference in the signal (quality, purity or level) between a radio which has the 100 watt stage built in, and one that has an external 100 watt stage of the same quality.

Due to economies of scale, it might be cheaper to just buy one QRP radio and one 100 watt radio than buying a QRP radio with a 100 watt external amplifier, but if you've invested in a high quality QRP radio then a 100 watt amplifier could be an economical choice.

It follows that you can connect the output from the 100 watt amplifier into a 1000 watt amplifier, but the control cable setup might be a bit complicated by this daisy-chaining.

If you've come across "ZENKI" before you'll know that he has some rather "original" ideas about math, physics and radios - ideas which aren't shared by scientists, engineers and other amateurs. Since he seems to be against the idea of radios which are light enough to carry on hiking trips, I find it strange that he reads the QRP forum instead of sticking to the automobile, fixed or electric wheelchair stations where excess weight is less of an issue. Even a 10 kW AM broadcast station can be run at QRP levels, but it's not a very practical QRP setup. Neither is an IC-7000. An FT857 is what I'd call a marginal backpack radio - you can take it hiking but it is a bit of excess weight and power draw in it.

K0RGR, thanks for an insightful post.

There are actually some individuals in ARES groups I've heard about who "self-activate", in the sense that they have standing orders from their served agency to show up at a particular place if an emergency happens. They would then help call in more volunteers if needed, or just go home if the emergency passes.

Nobody else should self-activate though. Those concerned already know who they are.

As for the Volunteer Organizations Active in Disasters, there could be some unmet needs there as you say. (Just be careful with one of the NVOAD members, namely the Scientology Volunteer Ministers who are actually there to prevent emergency workers from doing their jobs. If you have any insufferable whackers in your area perhaps encourage them to go help the Volunteer Ministers? "Yo dawg, I heard you like wearing yellow jackets while bothering emergency workers, so I'm here to wear a yellow vest while wearing a yellow jacket so you can be bothered while you're bothering people." )

Those quotes sound to me as more of an argument to get proper training and affiliation if you want to help out.

If you're serving a government agency or a non-governmental organization it's a good idea to check the state of liability insurance, waivers, etc. For those who get angry and cry about "elitism" when they can't just show up with their HT at the spur of the moment and be put to work, it's one more reason why you need training even if you "know" that you know it all. Their insurance terms might require you to attend training anyway.

It could be the same with using dangerous machinery; you might be a chainsaw god, but if some local church asks for volunteers to help clear trees from peoples' yards after a hurricane, they could still turn you away if you don't have a document showing that you've been certified as a sawyer by the US Forest Service. It's called "cover your backside", to say it politely, and with the current lawyer surplus in the US it's easy to be sued.

I haven't noticed, but I have noticed that they get animated - sometimes upset - if people cause QRM to emergency communications. They tend to have that in common with most people, including non-hams and emergency workers actually. "SEELONCE DISTRESS!" Instead, it seems to me that it's the few, the proud, vocal anti-emcomm activists online who seem to subscribe to the "my niche should be the only niche of amateur radio" mindset.

For the populations and governments who have given us these frequencies to play with, however, EMCOMM is the perhaps biggest reason why we have them. It's not the only reason - technological development, inspiring the engineers of the future, international goodwill and friendship also count, but the reason the ARRL lobbyists beat that drum is because it's what's nearest to the heart of the voters and politicians.

Not directly, I think. People who only get a license for emergencies don't tend join the League, I think. In fact the ARRL's emergency managers encourage those people to be more active on the radio. Indirectly though, if hams think the ARRL are doing a good job with lobbying, in addition to QST, LotW, etc. they'd be more likely to join, right?
Some bands might be moved or re-assigned, but without it I think we'd have less bandwidth - if any.
Clubs are a mixed bag. If it's not working and training well, and they won't take advice, perhaps it's time to escalate it to the section level?

Haiti lacks amateur radio operators - it tends to be a rich peoples' hobby in many parts of the world. In some parts of the world you also have to be a "friend of the regime" to get a license. Interestingly, in Haiti it seems the Internet kept up better than regular phone services did, and the lack of amateurs meant amateurs only could play a limited role in the initial phase.

I don't think any ARES group is dimensioned to take over the whole town's internal and external communications needs at the same time. But it might not take much of a disaster for a communications emergency to occur. For example, a wayward backhoe happening at the same time as a tree falling in the forest could take out the two redundant communications links out of the town. Even a technologically advanced nation like Norway, with a far more robust power distribution system than the US/Canada, was effectively cut in half by such an event last year.

If something like that happened, it could still be possible to call inside the town, and the LE/FD/EMS repeaters might work, but the ARES group might have to handle traffic out of and into town. Perhaps there is an available satellite link, but the amateurs work on health and welfare traffic, and at the same time serve as a backup in case the satellite becomes unavailable for official traffic.

With complex systems, even something like a software error in a switch could cause cascading failures. It has happened both internally in institutions like hospitals, or in larger geographical areas.

So ARES could become relevant with just a single failure. Also amateur radio emergency response is more than ARES; Skywarn and CERT would be relevant even without an actual communications emergency.
Portable cell towers could take some time to move into location. If roads are washed out, it could take days. As for the repeaters and base stations, there are limits to their battery backups and generators are expensive, and a seismic or weather event that takes out the primary repeater could well take out the secondary at the same time. They might not be destroyed, but something like the microwave link antennas being out of alignment.

If mobile command posts and simplex don't work, few things will work at all. But perhaps something like NVIS could still work. Or modulated light. And UHF simplex isn't very good for communications over longer distances.

If we've learned anything about communications emergencies, it's that even fail-safe systems can fail, and that even though not every emergency is the "end of the world as we know it" where everything fails, even a single system failure could cause an emergency.

Just to sum up

In a strategic MAD scenario:
Shutting down amateur radio won't make much difference since the preferred delivery vehicle is the intercontinental ballistic missile, launched from submarines or silos, instead of the strategic bombers of yesteryear, and electronic navigation has come a long way since the days of CONELRAD.

In case of terrorists or rogue states smuggling in devices and detonating them on the ground:
Shutting down amateur radio would be pointless, and would even be counter-productive since trained amateur radio volunteers could be useful if the detonation results in a communication emergency and/or a damage assessment effort is needed.
An exception could be if the terrorists use amateur frequencies to detonate the bombs, but (at least for conventional terrorist bombs) timers or cell phones seem more popular.

In case of terrorists or rogue states flying the devices in on a small number of planes:
In this case, it might be useful to shut down aeronautical navigational aids, GPS, broadcasters, and other radio transmitters. This to deny the attacking planes the opportunity to use radio direction finding to locate their targets (by locking on to a broadcast station or very active ham station in the target city).
This would have a substantial impact on air traffic and communications, so I'd imagine it would be a temporary measure until the threat could be eliminated.

If they have power in a town, it tends to be a mess of wires though. That goes for many third world towns as well: No planning, and extension cords hung in creative ways. Also trees and washing lines.

I would think that depends on the gauge of the shunt wire, where it's placed, the soil resistance, and the physical distance from the antenna ground rods to the AC service ground rod.

To be clear, I was describing hanging the coax on the exterior wall, a few inches from the house AC wiring, as a very bad thing to do that could induce current or cause arcing to the AC wiring, and then damaging the wiring on the path to the AC service entry or even to appliances near water or gas pipes. I compared this to scenario 2 with a shunt wire between the AC and antenna ground points, but this shunt wire should be buried outside the drip line of the building. If you run coax to a common entry point (scenario 3), the right thing to do would be to bury this coax a certain distance away from the house and only let it approach the house when it's perpendicular to the common entry point.

A shunt wire or coax hung inches away from the house AC wiring is bad - burying them a sufficient distance from the house would is good. Agreed?

The point I tried to make by that example is that a correct modification of scenario 2 would be far better than a poor execution of scenario 3.

OK. I'm still not sold on the figures, but yes I'd mount the power outlets on the panel in scenario 2, and as you say in scenario 1 it could at least save the radio equipment while not protecting the rest of the house.

In my example of poor execution of scenario 3, the coax is simply hung on the exterior wall of the house. It then acts as the only connection between the four ground rods at the antenna and the AC service ground rod, and the lightning current flowing in the plasma left behind by the evaporated shield would be substantial. Right?

We have three scenarios here, but the difference between them is - I think - a matter of degree. If you execute scenario 2 with a small shunt wire hung on the exterior wall, it's not much different from scenario 1. And if you execute scenario 3 by likewise hanging the coax on the exterior wall, it's almost as bad as scenario 1. But if you execute scenario 2 with a good enough external ground ring/grid between the entries, it looks electrically almost like a well executed scenario 3.

My weakness here is that I can't quantify the wire sizes and configurations myself, since I'm not an electrical or RF engineer. I can only refer to the work done by others. If you use sufficiently long buried coax in scenario 1, yes I imagine you'd limit the strike energy that makes it to the house so much that further protection is not needed, but I imagine that the losses in that long coax would make the installation unusable. However, it would only protect against a tower strike of the design size, not any other type of transient, so only scenario 2 or 3 could be executed safely, in my opinion.

If you are sure lighting will only strike your tower, yes. But if you have a risk of lighting or other transients coming into your house on the AC service, seeking your antenna ground, then it would be better to have more AC ground rods and fewer antenna ground rods. Since transients can come both ways, both sets of ground rods need to be sufficiently bonded with wire buried outside the drip line - that way they help each other dissipate the transients into ground with minimal conduction through the house.

By your simulation results it sounds like a pretty good DX antenna, if you can rotate it, since you can null out undesired noise sources and local signals, and get a good take-off angle.
Is it comparable to a vertical phased array?