[t160hq]

I have a triple rca and a DN 500 mounted on a 50 tower. As well as another DN500 and a rca single mounted on the porch. None of them are grounded.
I have never been hit by lighting. A tree 10 feet from the house and fifteen feet from the porch and tower took a direct hit in a lighting strike and never touched anything in the house.

Having said that the reason is my house is wired right to protect from lighting hits. No not surge protectors. Don't have any hooked up to anything.

Got an article on how and why you get hit by lighting and how even you can prevent lighting
hits. I'll dig it up scan and post it. It does a great job of explaining it.

Basiclly the key is all grounds run to one point. Anything in the house connected to the electric must have their grounds run to a single point. Best place is the grounding rod on the electric box. That means everything. Washer, dryer (these usually go to a water pipe), telephone service box (usually has it's own ground rod bad thing), antenna towers, detached garages, outbuildings with electric, grounding blocks for sat dishes ect. You get the picture.

Another factor is the grounding rod itself. You can have a copper
rod driven 8 feet in the ground. All the wires connected properly and
still have a bad ground. Lighting strike waiting to happen. Takes a
special meter to measure the ground resistance on the rod to make
sure it's properly grounded. And that's still not a guarentee. Factors
like soil composition, how wet or dry it is can affect the ground. So
actual location of the ground rod is a factor as well.

t160hq

Grounding is not required to have your system work, it's really just a safety issue. If you're house or dish was struck by lightning, the grounding setup mentioned in most installation manuals would direct most of the "blow' down the grounding wire outside of the house. I'm not sure that it protects the IRD or any part of the system 100%, and in fact I'm pretty sure it would not. What it does do though is direct as much of the strike as possible outside the house and to ground, (thereby avoiding the flash running through the house and starting a fire or hurting someone inside). This makes everything a little safer should a lightning strike occur, there is way less chance of lightning entering the house through the dish/IRD/TV path.

We've got a robotic observatory on a bit of a hill out in the middle of a wide open field. We've got an antenna right next to it, and lightning protection about 10 feet away on the observatory. The Observatory has been struck once and you can still see the scorch marks (minimal cosmetic damage), on the fiberglass. None of the electronics (or optics) inside were damaged. And that little dome is loaded with Proms, EEproms, CMOS, CCD's, etc. About 1/2 a mile away, a farmer had a fibeglass grainery, that was struck (or at least he's pretty sure that's what happened) and there's nothing left but a hole in the ground about 18" deep and 8 feet accross. He found a couple of bits of fiberglass strewn around about 25 feet away.

I'm with t160hq on the grounding rods, they really only work if they're actually making GOOD electrical contact with the ground. At the observatory we keep them well watered if the ground starts to get dry.

valenti