Antenna Grounding...

[TheForce]

I was under the house yesterday and decided to inspect the panel box ground since this subject has come up. I know I do not have a bond wire between my dish ground rods and the panel box. So, I plan to add that soon. It's only a 25 ft run under the house so it shouldn't be too difficult. Need to pick up some #6 Copper at Home Depot today. I also noticed there is no bond wire under the house that bonds the service panel to the meter outside. This is about a 40 ft. run and as best I can tell it is only connected with the primary 200 amp service neutral. The meter box is grounded to its own ground wire / rod. I have about 3 volts floating on the neutral in the house at the Home theater and I wonder if not having the bond on the dish grounds has generated that. I always felt that was just inductance.

 

[bhelms]

That 3 volts neutral-to-ground could just be a result of some (rather substantial?) current flowing through that branch. If the grounds in that branch run to the main panel, and you add the bond so that the ground strap in the panel is bonded to the entrance ground then you should be OK as far as grounding goes. But without both of the bonds you mentioned you have a risk of groundloops and the associated problems...

 

[unionbro]

Thought this might help some

Hi everyone, just thought i would include a link to some very good grounding information, It's an article written by Mike Holt. Mike also has his own website and a National Electrical Code forum. I use it quite often in my electrical trade.

Installing radio and TV antenna systems <~ Grounding Article with visual aids.

Mike Holt's Forum - Powered by vBulletin <~ Mike Holts NEC Code Forum

 

[Foxbat]

I ran into a ground loop when I first installed my dish 12 years ago. I was a good boy and installed the ground block where the RG6 went into the house. When I got everything connected to my stereo, HMMMMMMMMMMM, I seem to have a bit of hum in my system. I found two things that I had to correct in my house:

1) Bonding the two ground rods. Since the rods were 25 feet apart, this was a no-brainer, but it involved trenching along the side of the house to lay in the #6 copper ground cable. Hum should be gone, but not quite.

2) In examining the electrical panel in the basement, I discovered a ground cable that ran to a copper 1/2" cold water pipe. I followed the cold water pipe back to where it came up from the meter and I found that a section had been replaced by PVC pipe by the original owner. There was no bonding between the copper segments, so the electrical box "ground" was based on the conductivity of the cold water in the PVC pipe. I fixed that with another #6 cable to connect the isolated cold water pipe to the 1" copper line that came out of the floor.

That squashed the ground loop once and for all.