What use is an F-call?

Every day you learn something new. I realise that's an obvious comment, but I am regularly surprised at the range of experience and education that Amateur Radio brings to my life.

In the weekly F-troop a topic of conversation raised by Graham VK6FSGH was station grounding. It's a topic that gets a range of coverage on the Internet.

Often grounding is ignored, or only just hinted at by documentation. Antenna designs online regularly offer instruction on how long a piece of wire should be and how high it should be in the air, but not often a discussion on what the ground should look like.

Graham pointed us at a document written and published by Motorola, titled "Standards and Guidelines for Communication Sites". It's a 518 page tome on the topic of setting up a communication site.

I'm still reading, but so far it covers all you want to know about anything. Chapter 4 was what caught our initial attention, it's 100 pages on the topic of external grounding. That's not the only part about grounding either. There's the chapter on internal grounding, 72 pages and the appendices on measuring ground resistivity, and one on verifying your grounding electrode system.

All the websites that discuss in great detail how to build an antenna are handily supplemented by this document. It also points at specific Australian standards for all manner of interesting things, like lightning protection, concrete structures, galvanised coatings, tower design, and more.

In case you're thinking it's a dry technical read, it includes instructions that require a small sledgehammer, a tape measure, safety glasses and gloves, so be prepared to learn and do something.

The document is called the "Standards and Guidelines for Communication Sites" written by Motorola.

Happy reading.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB