Do you have your Satellite cables running through a serge protector? If not you should.
And make sure you get some Real grounding cable and ground your dish properly.
Those tiny ground cables that come with D* and E* wires are not enough to ground lightning. I'm not telling you to go out and get that braided wire that attached to your meter box , but a 8 or 10 guage wire is much better protection.
Ground your Dish with it. Because Lightning travels the shortest distance.
That little ground wire thats on the RG6, I've seen that hit by lightning, Its not a pretty sight!
Neither was the guys house after it followed his cable into the house.
All of this is good planning, but...
The purpose of good grounding and surge protectors is to bleed a charge before it builds up to damaging levels.
None of this is going to make a bit of difference on a real lightning strike. Lightning will treat one of those power strip surge protectors as an after dinner mint. Worse, since they are generally in the same box as the power strip, they will often provide a discharge path that wouldn't have been there otherwise.
A lightning strike is millions of volts of discharge with a fair amount of potential current flow. A LOT of energy that has to be dissapated. The best strategy for avoiding lightning strikes is to provide something more convenient to take the strike, and to not have delicate equipment hooked up.
I'm a ham radio guy (WA9OHS), and as a teenager I lost a tranceiver and nearly burned the house down from a strike. I thought I was safe because I had an antenna switch with a grounding position. The switch was set to "ground" the antennas. Switch was grounded to both a water pipe and to a 6' ground rod outside the window. All was connected with 8 ga aluminum wire. The lightning strike didn't care. It melted the ground wires and happily munched on the equipment.
As for the ground wire, people tend to think that a wire to ground is absolute. However, the quality of "ground" is very dependent on the resistance of the strap, length of the rod, moisture level of the earth, type of soil, other functions in the area that are using ground, etc.
When I was in college, one of my friends worked as a phone installer (back when there was still a Ma Bell and she did that). One night he was installing near a power substation he went to connect the phone ground to a grounding rod. He took a hit that was later measured at over 400V because the power substation had saturated the ground reference in the immediate area.
The lesson to be learned here is that "ground" is a relative reference, not absolute.
