whats left of a nice center insulator with a balun..

Here is a blurb about my lightning strike in July '07

Close by we got hit either on my 120' dipole or a spike off a strike. either way, it blew the dipole apart! the Center  balun exploded and landed

in the yard, 6-8' either side of the balun the wire was fried down to brittle copper. I had one of those German made off center fed, aircraft wire

dipoles from HRO I bought 10 years ago. It fed the heathkit antenna switch and blew that apart. Came in thru the relay box to the actual switch

that was sitting on top of my Trac Electronics keyer. down thru that into the TS-940s, and also into the external speaker SP-940. The 940 was

unplugged from the wall and the antenna. It was NOT grounded. (BOO BOO)

From there it traveled into the router on my desk, to the cable modem. thru that into the upstairs VCR, Bedroom TV and stereo.

My HP3050 all in one laser printer was plugged into the network, that's fried and my wife's pc lost the network card.

To Date:

I bought a new stereo on ebay for 19$, someone gave us a new bedroom TV and I bought a new VCR! ( got one that records DVD's now)

The HP printer is on EBAY. the network card has 2-3 cooked components on it but parts are good for repair of one in need...

The 940, That took me 6 months of poking around to fix, I replaced the control board and a chip in the front panel that controls the mode selections.

It was stuck in CW!

 All in all I never called the insurance company as it cost me less than the $500 deductible to fix this junk myself. I needed something to do anyway HI HI

Most of the stuff other than the 940 and the printer was low value. Trac Keyer, I paid $8 for all new chips as I couldn't find the schematic but as of this morning

12/28/07 its working! The antenna switch, well, I'll fix it, old heathkit so maybe I'll make it better :)

i'll post pictures when I get time of all this.

  This is an ongoing money pit! but its like insurance, you need it if you value your equipment.

The shack now has a ground buss in it. I have wide braided cable coming in from the outside, It only has 2 ground rods connected but I will connect more

as the weather breaks. I'm figuring at least 2 more. I'm going to run a buss bar across the back of the desk and ground everything to it.

The coax inputs (2) one 2m and the new 160m  dipole! are now run through 2 barrel connectors that are placed thru a copper strip 4" wide by 10" long

wrapped around a copper ground rod driven into the ground sticking out 10". About 3' later they go into a wx tight box, where 2 polyphaser's are mounted

on a copped plate and grounded thru one ground rod. then into the shack where another (no comments here please) MFJ arrester is attached to each radio.

My MFJ antenna analyzer reads about 1:1.6 swr thru all these into a 50ohm dummy load placed at the end of the coax outside.

Good sources of info....the ARRL website, Google polyphaser, plenty of info available. I looked at shack pictures of other hams who did their thing.

put it all together, see what you can afford and try it!

good luck and will see what the summer brings.