I have a RF surge protection device [like geckoVN] inline with my coax that is directly attached to the ground bar that is mounted inside my radio shack. I have 8’ of copper in the ground to support the ground bar. The grounding will significantly reduce your standing ground noise level and the surge protection potentially disconnects when it recognizes a voltage potential. I personally have lost numerous pieces of expensive electronics inside the home [not protected by what I described above] from lightning ground strikes near my home that traveled through the soil to my house electrical ground rod and entered the house on the ground leg. That’s some big nasty! Currently have surge protection built in to the commercial electrical entrance meter.
I’m shocked that truck won’t start.
Lightning disabled my PiAware receiver a month ago.
The Pi is mounted on a rock in my yard to have a better view to the south than at my house. The Pi is connected to my home network (and powered) by 70 meters of Ethernet cable buried in PVC conduit. The lightning strike didn’t hurt the Pi but it did kill the power-over-Ethernet switch in my house that it’s connected to. The switch has several ports, some plain Ethernet and some with PoE. The PoE ports were dead but not the plain ones, which suggests that the surge came through the Ethernet cable and not the switch’s power supply.
The same thunderstorm also took out my cable modem and the router it was connected to. My cable service also uses buried (coax) cable.
Were you using shielded & grounded Ethernet cable?
I use it for all of my outdoor cabling because the Tampa Bay area typically has over 100 days of lightning each year. I’ve never lost any equipment due to lightning or power surges. BTW all of my network equipment uses POE.
The buried Ethernet cable isn’t shielded or grounded. My mistake–it didn’t occur to me to look for shielded cable when I put it in. This area doesn’t get a lot of thunderstorms and this is the first time I’ve ever lost equipment to lightning.
As an alternative, I’ve been running some longish wifi links with mediocre success. Rather than trying to improve the wifi, I’ve gone sideways and in the process of replacing the wifi links with Gbit fibre.
The plus side compared to UTP/ STP is no practical distance limit (it’s normally 20km)
The downside is that you can’t run power.
Other advantages are no earth loops and immunity to lightening.
It’s easiest to buy pre-assembled cables, or you can invest in new toolkit to give yourself greater flexibility.
I certainly don’t ‘need’ Gbit, 100Mb would do, but where is the fun in that?
Great idea!
So are you going w/solar for power for the ABS receiver? Or just running DC on some wire and filtering the daylights out of it for protection, and maybe add a gas discharge tube too?
What powers the fiber’s Tx/Rx? The USB port?
Yep - large solar panels (~250W) at the remote end (the panels are ex-house installs and virtually free).
And a battery to keep it running over night.
The media converters run 5~12V input and draw about 2W, so a modest battery is adequate.
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