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After our on air discussion about storms, electricity discharge I found an interesting article covering various ways of solving the issue and protecting the equipment.
https://www.criticalcomms.com.au/co...iocommunication-sites-872304496#axzz6dYmeNUidOn a normal fine, sunny day the earth has a slight negative polarity, and the electric field so created is about 300 V per metre. As a thunder cloud forms, separation of electric charge in the cloud creates a surplus of negative charge in the base of the cloud and over a period of many minutes this will build up to create an electric field in the order of 10 kV per metre. Imagine the electric field as essentially horizontal lines, as per Figure 1.
The use of a choke at first may appear to be a good solution, however the shortfall is that the reactance will vary with operating frequency, the best method is the neon globe, its capacitance is so low that the reactive effect will be negligible.The choke looks to be the way to go.
It would be interesting to test a few and see what changes to the antenna tuning result.
This uses the principle set by the Paschen curve, here is a link to better understand " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasch... at standard conditions,is therefore 3.4 MV/m. "In the old days some longwire instalations used a static bleeder to discharge such voltages to ground . The gadget consisted of a porcelain body with two sawtooth plates adjusted for a couple of thou. separation, one plate on the line the other plate on the ground cable.This thing would crackle and fizz away with ever increasing intensity in the presence of a storm until a nearby lightning strike would discharge the immediate area, after a short time the process would start again and would continue until such time as the storm moved away. Maybe a spark gap discharge could be used to advantage in parallel with other devices in the "ALL IN ONE DISCHARGE BOX"