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It's Called Single Point Grounding. Reason - To Eliminate A Potential Difference Between Having (2) Separate Grounding Systems. Single Point Grounding Is Done On All Commercial Tower Sites.

I just came back from our club's Field Day exercise. I spent about an hour as a control operator with an unlicensed operator, showing him how to make contacts and a little bit on how to operate the radio (tuning, notch filtering, RF gain vs AF volume). He had 22 contacts on 40 meter phone (7.2-7.3 mHz) when I turned him over to another licensed operator, most across the country and a couple in Canada. He was very excited and was having a great time.

I programed my AR-10 today.. Its dead center in tune.

To prevent electrical noise being transferred from one system into the other system. You are drawing power from one electrical system thus you should be using only one grounding system. If you have two earth grounding points then you have two grounding systems and that will cause problems.

Correct - Because Commercial Sites Don't Have A House - They Have A Structure Or A Cabinet For Equipment. The Structure Or Cabinet Requires Proper Bonding - For Single Point Grounding - To Avoid A Ground Potential Difference.

From my experience you'll have neighbors who will jump on board immediately after a motivating event. Others take more than one event but will come around. And some who won't ever get involved, but certainly take advantage of your connected group. It's hard to keep everyone involved active as the motivating event fades from memory. Sadly, so far, we've had enough events that folks have stayed involved. From the initial home invasion to somewhat frequent medical emergencies.

You are the opposite of a “Sad Ham”. Great job!

Obviously you don’t ground a fiberglass mast, but your coax shield is attached to part of the antenna somewhere and it will develop a charge as air currents pass over it. Now the difference in potentials is between the metal parts of the antenna connected to the shield of the coax and the service ground, again going through your equipment and possibly you. One of the purposes of a surge suppressor (commonly called a lightning protector but nobody guarantees that) is to allow you to bond the coax shield to the grounding system.

It's no different than using a chimney mount or a satellite dish mount on your roof. You run the proper sized ground wire from the antenna/mount to ground. Look at a properly installed satellite dish antenna. There will be a ground wire running with the coax. And that ground wire should be bonded to your service ground before the coax enters the structure. The same goes for cable TV, there will be a ground wire coming off the feed to your home and it to will be grounded to the service ground when installed correctly.

Dogs like us struggle with keyboards. I'm trying to get into CW. Strait key obviously. Paddles are out of the question.

Unless I misread the NEC and other sources, the tower should have its own ground and be bonded to the service ground. This is correct. Steve did a good job of expelling things

Let’s disregard lightning protection for a few minutes and just talk about bonding to your house service ground. Your tower is sort of grounded. We all agree with that I think. It’s embedded in an imperfect conductor, concrete, at the bottom. To improve the grounding a ground wire runs from each leg of the tower to a ground rod. But any two separate ground rods are almost always at different potentials. Whenever you have different potentials between two points in a circuit you will have electric currents flowing from one point to the other. So, the three or four legs of the tower are bonded together using a material that is more conductive than the tower itself. Otherwise you have current flowing between the legs of your tower. If current flows between the legs of your tower over time the metal of the tower will corrode. Bonding between the three or four legs provides an easier path for the current to flow which keeps the legs all at the same potential. In addition your antenna mount is certainly connected electrically to your tower and your coax shield is connected to your antenna mount. Your coax shield then runs to your radio. If you have a watt meter, amplifier, or any other device between your radio and your antenna, they are all connected serially via the coax shield. Their metal cases are all connected to the coax shield. So all of the devices in your shack are connected together via the coax shield. If a power surge comes through the shield (static, lightning, unicorn farts, whatever) it is going to cause current to flow through your equipment because that’s the most direct path. By bonding the chassis of all those devices to a single point, we provide a much better path that doesn’t flow through those devices. So that’s why we use a single point ground. But remember, that single point ground is connected to ground at the tower. You power your radio with a power supply that’s plugged into your house power. Its case is connected to the ground wire in the outlet which runs back to the service panel where it’s bonded to the service ground for the utility power coming into your house. It has to be because NEC says so. So let’s say you don’t have your single point ground bonded to your service ground. You reach out to touch your radio and at the same time your brush your other hand on the power supply. The potential of your tower ground, which is what your one hand is touching, is probably different than the potential of the service ground, which is what your other hand is feeling. And it’s DC. Your heart can be stopped by as little as 1/10 of an ampere. So you die. So we bond the tower ground to the utility ground to ensure they are at the same potential and save your life. Also with fewer ground currents in the shack we hear less noise.

That was my logic, hence my confusion at the recommendation to do that.

I don't know why the quote box attributed that line to you. Probably my bad though.

True, if your definition of "SHTF" is only "massive, region or nation wide calamity or collapse." There's a whole lot of gray area between that and "normal", even more localized disasters (weather events, wildfires out in the sticks or on the edge of town, extended power outages) where they're totally appropriate for a situation where the shit has totally hit the fan, just maybe not to the point to where the zombies are chewing on the door knobs. Which is a long way of saying, they're useful in a whole lot of real world situations that might not reach the level of a massive, metro-wide (or worse) problem, but which someone is a lot more likely to encounter in reality than those larger scale problems.

...that can also receive VHF & UHF, including 70cm. But chances are he was a a GMRS channel and was hearing linked repeaters.

I just received mine yesterday. The first thing I did was download the factory configuration file. Then, I tested power output at all three levels on different parts of both bands and recorded the results. I then uploaded a CHIRP file using the BF-F8HP profile and retested the power. It remained the same after programming as before, so whatever the problem is, apparently I didn't get one that has it. I was a little disappointed that power maxed out at 6-7 watts, but it's not all that big a deal, I guess. I'll probably never notice the difference, but if I buy a 10 watt radio, I'd like for it to actually output 10 watts.

Usually when you have a 141.3Hz tone that means it's usually designated for travelers and an open repeater.

Good catch that would have been even better without the snarky comment about knowing how to use the map.

I have both the UV9PX and the Q10H and I feel they are both good radios. Dispite the tri band vs quad band here are a few things I like about each. What I like about the UV9PX. if you plan to scan a lot it has faster scanning. I like that if I am monitoring two channels and I here a transmission I can look at the radio and there is an indicator that tells me if it was the upper or lower display that receaved the last transmission. It's also a bit more in wattage. What I like about the Q10H. As mentioned the display is better. I like having the upper and lower PTT (note while it didn't come set this way you can set these so the top is always the top display and the bottom is always the bottom display) it makes it easy to not transmit on the wrong frequency by mistake. It's rated IP67 so it's good for going outdoors. I also like how solid it feels. I have dropped it pretty hard and not a scratch. It has room for more characters when naming channels. I have yet to really use the GPS other than testing but if that's somthing that appeals to you the Q10H has it. To sum up, if I'm in my kitchen or out in the garage and listening to a couple of local repeaters while otherwise engaged I'll use the UV9PX so if a call comes in I can easily see which repeater it was so I can respond. If however I'm taking the dog on a hike or going to the lake or off-roading than the Q10H is what I'll grab. Hope this helps you decide what your needs are and which radio to get. Edit: it’s worth mentioning that back when I wrote this my Q10H didn’t have a last call indicator that worked and thus thought it didn’t have it. I later reached out to Buy Two Way Radios and they replaced the radio for me.