naturerecordists
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Lightning arrestor

Subject: Re: Lightning arrestor
From: "Mike Feldman" gidney_n_cloyd
Date: Mon Jul 30, 2007 3:08 pm ((PDT))
On 30 Jul, 2007, at 3:05 PM, Ted Coffey wrote:

>  When it comes to lightning there is a risk no matter what you do. ...
> ... but lightning can still strike and the path is somewhat 
> uncertain...

And even if the path of the bolt is away from your gear, there's often 
enough
voltage induced in wiring of all kinds to blow junctions.

A couple of years ago I went to a talk by Bill Whitlock, President of 
Jensen Transformers
and he touched on lightning protection.  The thing he said that stuck 
with me was that
lightning didn't like to turn sharp corners.  So locate your lightning 
grounds with a straight
path to earth or with sweeping large radius turns and make your 
signal/data tap at right
angles to the ground path.

>  The best protection is to physically disconnect the microphone cables
>  whenever lightning nearby or you are not monitoring. The unconnected
>  cable must not provide a path to ground.

If you can't disconnect, I suppose the safest thing would be to have 
expendable mics,
pre and ADC and run the signal to your expensive inside gear with 
optical cable.

-- Mike







<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Admin

The University of NSW School of Computer and Engineering takes no responsibility for the contents of this archive. It is purely a compilation of material sent by many people to the naturerecordists mailing list. It has not been checked for accuracy nor its content verified in any way. If you wish to get material removed from the archive or have other queries about the archive e-mail Andrew Taylor at this address: andrewt@cse.unsw.EDU.AU