coax grounding question

jswinf · 9-Jan-2013, 6:18 PM

I'm installing an antenna, preparing to ditch cable, etc.

The antenna's going on the roof using a mast that was there when we bought our house 14 yrs ago (without an antenna on it.) It seems very sound, it's set in the ground and braced at the fascia board on one end of the house.

Reading about grounding baffles me, there are so many conflicting opinions. I've decided that for the antenna itself, it'll be on a steel pole that's set into the actual ground, so that oughta do it. No, I haven't dug it up to see if it's in 4 feet, but it's in enough to be sturdy and I'm comfortable living with that.

Grounding the cable sounds reasonable. Where it goes into the house is over a brick walkway, I could put a grounding block at that point and run a ground wire with the cable back to where I could run the ground wire down to a water pipe, it'd take about 25 feet of ground wire.

Or, I wonder if I could put the grounding block at roof level (along the cable run) above the water pipe and just need a few feet of ground wire to get down to the pipe. I like this idea, but then I'd have maybe 20 feet of cable running from the grounding block to enter the house.

Any advice? Thanks.

GroundUrMast · 9-Jan-2013, 10:41 PM

http://forum.tvfool.com/showthread.php?t=901
http://forum.tvfool.com/showpost.php...4&postcount=20

Ideally, run the coax to a location near your home electrical service ground rod (usually near the service meter) and install the ground block there. The total wire length between the coax grounding block and the service ground is best kept short, 10 feet or less.

Also, I would verify the mast is grounded with a low resistance conductor (#10 AWG or larger) the goal is to be able to carry a large current if there's ever a fault, that will keep voltage differences low even if there's a problem. Soil is often a very unreliable conductor. Copper wire is a 'known quantity' conductor that can be relied in far better than soil.