I needed a 3 foot piece of copper wire to go between my garage shack buss-bar and the outside ground rod.
Went to home depot. The only thing that day in their scrap bargin price left-overs bin was a piece of large
stranded wire at least the same diameter of the ground rod. Turn's out if was not such a bargin because it
was hard as all hell to bend and route. But now, it's like one solid continuous ground rod coming into the shack
ground bus-bar. From the bus-bar, I just use the 1/2 inch stranded flat cable that HRO sells, with gromet/screw
holes at each end. EVERYthing gets grounded. Power meters, rotor controller, PC chassis, tuner, WestMountain
DSP audio, everything. I don't have any RFI issues, no computer crashes, even on 40m, nothing. Rock solid.
Antenna coax lines all come into Alpha-Delta lightning arrestors mounted on the ground bus-bar in the shack.
They really belong out-side, but that is another storey for another day.
Point is; from day one, I don't have any issues with this shack for the three years I am operating. I have
a rotating dipole and an end-fed EFHW wire antenna. I drive 500 watts. No PC issues, no equipment issues,
no neighbor issues. On 40 meters, it always turns on a touch-lamp in the house, and used to open the garage
door until I put a few mix-30 toroids on the garage door controller wires. Very happy with the station.
Reliable and no unexpected problems.
When grounding all your station equipment DO NOT forget to attach a braided ground wire to a screw on the PC,
and connect that to your ground bus-bar. Without doing this, especially if using a random wire or EFHW, where RF
comes back on the coax shield, you are likely to eventually blow out the USB port on your PC main board.
If using a laptop for your shack, you can accomplish the same by cutting up a USB cable, and soldering your
braided ground wire in the shack, onto the outer shell USB connection. Plug it into a USB port on the laptop and
that will provide a really good effective ground connection to the laptop, preventing potential USB port damage.
Good grounding is the difference between solid reliability and constant problems.
Cheers,
Neal