Tower Grounding System

Now that spring is here, we’ve continued work on our EME station project. The most recent project was to build the tower grounding system for our new EME tower. The proper way to ground a tower is shown above. Each leg of the tower is connected to an 8′ ground rod via a heavy gauge ground cable. The cable is attached to the tower leg using stainless steel clamps meant for this purpose. The three ground rods associated with the tower legs are then bonded together using a heavy copper ground cable ring.

Ground Cable CAD Weld

The ground cables are welded to the top of the ground rods using CAD weld on-shots. This creates a strong connection that will not corrode or fail. It is important that the ground rods be free of dirt, corrosion, oxidation, and burrs before performing the CAD welding. We used a combination of 3-wire and 4-wire one-shot CAD welds to build our ground system and connect it to the bonding system running from our tower to the entry to our shack.

Main Grounding System Bonding

The final step was to connect the bonding run from the tower to the perimeter grounding system around our house. This completed the tower grounding system and enabled us to complete our final permit inspection courtesy of our local building inspector.

Finished Tower Base

With all of this work done and the inspection complete, we added a mulch bed around our new tower to make this area of our lawn easy to maintain.

The next step in our project is to begin building the antennas that will go on our EME tower. You can read more about our EME station project via the links that follow:

• EME Station 2.0 Part 1 – Goals and Station Design
• EME Station 2.0 Part 2 – Excavation, Footings, and Conduits for New Tower
• EME Station 2.0 Part 3 – Phase Tuned Receive Coax Cables
• EME Station 2.0 Part 4 – New EME Tower Is Up!
• EME Station 2.0 Part 5 – Control Cables and Rotator Controller
• EME Station 2.0 Part 7 – Building Antennas
• EME Station 2.0 Part 8 – Elevation Rotator Assembly and Sub-System Test
• EME Station 2.0 Part 9 – H-Frame Assembly
• EME Station 2.0 Part 10 – Antennas On The Tower
• EME Station 2.0 Part 11 – Station Hardware in the Shack
• EME Station 2.0 Part 12 – Station Software
• EME Station 2.0 Part 13 – H-Frame Enhancements
• EME Station 2.0 Part 14 – New 1.5 Kw Amplifier

If you’d like to learn more about How To Get Started in EME, check out the Nashua Area Radio Society Teach Night on this topic. You can find the EME Tech Night here.

Fred, AB1OC