G5RV type antenna

WhiteStarNC

WhiteStarNC

That's the fact Jack!
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About to get my general and looking at antennas. I will have some trees in the back yard of my new house. - shack will be upstairs facing the trees.

I can understand getting the wires up in the tree but how do I get the central feed line back to the house and upstairs?
Also - how the heck do you drive in a 6 foot ground rod?

Any input on the subject is appreciated. I know some will ask which bands but I honestly don't know that yet

73
KN4CQB
 
you feed the ladder line with coax, the ground rod, a big hammer and pray you don't hit rock.try this link to explain how it is fed. I would save my pennys, there are better hf antennas than g5rv. been an extra for almost 20 yrs.
http://hamuniverse.com/g5rv.html

de,73 kn4wd
 
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When I lived in GA one of my cable co buddies told me about driving a ground rod with nothing more that a bottle of water or two. And ya know, it works- better in clay than just sand and such, but he did it and so have I since then.
Start the hole, then pull the ground rod up and pour water in the hole- slam the rod back in and out, the water makes it easy.
It can be a little messy, but it works.
Sounds like a bad porn article, doesn't it?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-J120AZ using Tapatalk
 
Thanks for posting. This subforum is too quiet
I don't know anything about G5RVs but on driving the ground rod get a fencepost driver it's a whole lot easier and probably substantially safer than a hammer.
Here's an article that has some interesting info
http://www.ecmweb.com/content/achieving-acceptable-ground-poor-soil

@WhiteStarNC what rig do you have for HF?
@dewey what antenna would you recommend instead of a G5RV?
 
a loop. cut for 80 will tune practically all hf bands. a windom, a multi band dipole. the loop has worked well for me and I have tried a lot of antennas in my time.you wont need a ground rod for the loop a 4:1 balun wire, a piece of 450 ladder line and three insulators. try this one plain and simple it works!
https://ws4bscom.ipage.com/FTP/MiniSuperLoop.pdf
 
This is the antenna I built: http://www.balundesigns.com/content/OCF Dipole V2.pdf
It uses a balun instead of ladder line to create the impedance match. With a G5RV I would be somewhat concerned about stray RF or fields entering my radio room when transmitting and would want to make sure that my system was properly grounded.

For the grounding system. The best advice I have is follow the NEC, which says to bond your antenna ground to your house electrical ground. I drove two additional ground rods, which all ground rods should be about 10' apart or else they won't function as multiple grounds. The easiest way is to rent a demolition hammer from Home Depot for about $30 (get the mid sized). You will need a ground rod bit for it and may have to buy / borrow one. It will drive the rod in a matter of minutes without any of the water tricks which might leave gap pockets (you want physical connection and continuity) and it won't mushroom the head like other methods.

What I did is put two grounds in and bonded them together and to the house ground with #6 bare copper wire. One of them, near where I wanted the cable to run, I put a bonding plate on the bar like this: https://www.dxengineering.com/parts/dxe-ucgc On that plate, which I did CLEAN with the cleaning kit I mounted a Polyphasher https://www.dxengineering.com/searc...toview=SKU&sortby=Default&sortorder=Ascending that the coax passss through. I wrapped it in a weather seal that is basically a self vulcanizing rubber: http://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-3-4-in-x-22-ft-Temflex-Splicing-Tape-Black-2155/202195401 which you should wrap all your coax connections in. From this plate, I used 1" thick copper strap and ran this to my radio room which is in the upstairs bonus room. There I got a ground bar: https://www.dxengineering.com/parts/ero-egba14210jf which I clamped the strap to with a piece of copper bus bar and used stainless steel hardware with some copper thread dope (SS is good for RF and you need to use the dope to keep it from corroding due to the dissimilar metals). I then bolted the radio ground lugs via braided strap to this ground bar.

As far as running into the house, I simply made a small slit in the aluminum cover under the roof eve and ran that into a crawl space where I mounted a low voltage box (no back) in the wall and passed the cable and ground strap through that.
You don't need to bury your coax but you can and it certainly wouldn't hurt in terms of adding to your safety grounding.
 
to each his own, been there done that when the lightning storms start and you pay for 2 hf rigs, 3 vhf uhf and several power supplies things change. remember this lightning is looking for a ground so give it one and it will eventually find it. two yrs in I learned my lesson. never lost a rig , power supply or antenna since I disconnected the ground. I shall take my chances.
 
You're right, to each his own, but I'll stand behind my understanding of grounding and lightning protection as a practicing electrical engineer of 20+ years and backed by that of the NEC and a hell of a lot of other engineers over some electrical folk wisdom like you stated.

Have at it.
 
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* There's a difference between an RF Ground to keep RF from an non-resonant antenna out of the shack and a protective ground.

* Tie everything to ground. Make it a single point ground connected at your service entrance ground.

* Use matched antennas and you'll not need to worry about "RF ground" ...which is much harder to obtain than protective ground.
 
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