[time-nuts] Best location for a GPS antenna...?

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Fri Apr 13 01:13:51 UTC 2012


On 4/12/12 12:02 PM, David McGaw wrote:
> Best would be to have a lightning rod in the vicinity of and above the
> antenna. A sharp-pointed rod does not attract lightning, it REPELS it
> and has a cone of protection under it. While the effect is not
> understood, it apparently discharges the surrounding air through corona
> discharge - the sharper the better.
>
>
Cone of protection it is, but it's because the lightning preferentially 
hits the rod, rather than something below it.

There's no discharging the earth/cloud capacitance. That theory has been 
thoroughly debunked, both analytically and experimentally. There's some 
great papers by some scientists at Erico in Australia where they were 
looking for "better designs" for lightning rods, so they set up a test 
facility to replicate the charge distributions and fields in the 
"prestrike" time.  This is very much trickier operation than testing for 
the discharge itself, or for EMP, where you just need a big Marx 
generator.  It's essentially a high voltage arbitrary waveform generator 
into a carefully designed TEM test cell of sorts.






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