Adding to David's comments:
If you will notice that every one of these people that sell these
dissipation arrays also recommend "extensive grounding and bonding" along
with their installation. This last one mentioned even recommends "surge
protectors on the coax and power cables".
Imagine that!
And they claim that the pointy things are what fixes the lightning problems.
No doubt that they can greatly reduce lightning damage with proper grounding
and bonding just like the guys that do this properly with out the pointy
things installed.
73
Gary K4FMX
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TowerTalk [mailto:towertalk-bounces@contesting.com] On Behalf Of
> David Robbins
> Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2017 6:38 PM
> To: reflector -tower
> Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Fwd: Interesting Site
>
> You know I keep reading the stuff on those and this pdf started to make
> some sense on what the thinking is about those porcupine things. First,
> they will NOT prevent lightning strikes, that has been proven... for
> those of you not interested in some other thoughts stop reading NOW!
>
> This reference pdf talks about dissipating static from airplanes and
> from van de graaff generators. In both of those cases I will agree that
> spiky dissipators will work. In both airplanes and van de graaff
> generators the surface area is relatively small, in the generator case
> maybe a couple square feet, in airplanes maybe several hundred or a
> couple thousand square feet of charged surface. In either case the
> accumulated charge from either wind or friction charging is relatively
> small and builds up slowly... on planes because they are insulated by
> lots of air, and on the generator because of the insulated post. In
> either case it is fairly easy to cause a flow of ions that dissipates
> the charge, in the case of the airplane its not even necessary to get
> rid of all the charge, just enough to prevent corona around the
> antennas. A dissipator may actually do something to help prevent static
> build up from wind blown snow or sand, has anyone tested them for that??
> a tower being
> charged by wind blown snow or sand may work more like an airplane since
> the amount of charge built up is relatively small.
>
> The problem comes when you try to scale that up to dissipate the charge
> induced from a convective storm. In the case of convective storms (with
> or without lightning) there is a large pool of charge in the base of the
> cloud often several thousand feet up. this large charge attracts the
> opposite charge on the ground which is essentially an infinite source of
> charge being drawn toward the cloud. There is of course no way a
> dissipator can affect that charge except very locally, and they may
> actually be good sources of the upward streamer that connects with the
> downward leader resulting in a lightning stroke to the dissipator
> itself.
>
> David Robbins K1TTT
> e-mail: mailto:k1ttt@arrl.net
> web: http://wiki.k1ttt.net
> AR-Cluster node: 145.69MHz or telnet://k1ttt.net:7373
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TowerTalk [mailto:towertalk-bounces@contesting.com] On Behalf Of
> Hans Hammarquist via TowerTalk
> Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2017 21:32
> To: towertalk@contesting.com
> Subject: [TowerTalk] Fwd: Interesting Site
>
> This topic has been discussed too may times and there seems to be nobody
> with a definite answer. I have dissipators on my own tower. They are
> rather easy to make. I haven't gotten any lightning strikes in them
> during the few years the tower been up. That doesn't mean they are
> effective. I have notice that I have had no strikes on my house,
> something that happened on a relatively regular basis, since the tower
> went up. I think the tower itself was the contributing factor to that,
> though.
>
> I had a 0-0, stranded aluminum cable at hand when I raised the tower and
> decided to put three, one on each leg, of them up. You can view they on
> my facebook page. Does it work? Honestly, I have no idea. I do think
> that you can build these dissipators yourself for a much lower price
> than what they are offered at.
>
> With 73 de,
>
> Hans - N2JFS/SM6BXX
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Don W7WLL <w7wll@arrl.net>
> To: Towertalk <towertalk@contesting.com>
> Sent: Sat, Jun 24, 2017 11:25 pm
> Subject: [TowerTalk] Interesting Site
>
>
> Ran across this looking for something else and noticed a section on
> towers, grounding and other items we are all interested in. Sample
> article.
>
> http://www.thebdr.net/articles/steel/twrs/TT-dissipators.pdf
>
> Don W7WLL
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