said by burner50 :

When i put up an aerial mast I was planning on digging an 18 inch trench and sinking in Four 8' rods 18 inches apart and welding 8 gauge copper to them.

said by Splitpair :

Generally speaking your ground rods should not be closer to each other than the length of the rod. So with 8 foot rods 10 foot spacing would be fine.

If you are a really anal such as I am you will place a new ground rod at each service (power Telco cable satellite and antennas) in addition to a ground rod at each corner of the building. Those rods are bonded by a bare buried copper wire to form as close to a ring as possible to avoid dead-end-points.

Your minimum wire gauge for grounding and bonding should be #6 bare copper with all connections exothermically welded.

ALL building grounds shall be bonded together to prevent any possibility of a ground potential difference between grounds. Failing to do so is like begging ole mother nature to destroy your electronics.

A common grounding point should be established in the hut/shack and all cables as well as equipment shall be grounded to this point before connection to equipment.

When building your common grounding point don’t forget to insulate it from the wall to prevent any secondary paths to ground.

Where not placed by the service provider place primary surge protectors as close as possible to where the service enters the building but if possible always external to the building to minimize the chance of fire should a hard cross with power cause a catastrophic failure of the surge protector.

Don’t fail to include in the above an entire-home surge protector for the power entering the home. Be sure that protector provides hot to hot, hot to neutral and all lines to ground protection.

Contrary to common belief underground service is not immune to surges and lighting hits. The reality is at least around here that equipment connected to underground residential distribution (URD) is more susceptible to being damaged as FP&L’s engineers have decided that URD transformers don’t require primary surge protection as the primary is buried which is true. However they install streetlights which do get hit and carry that hit to the secondary which is in parallel to the service feeding the homes connected to the URD system.

At least in aerial residential distribution (ARD) the primary acts as a static line taking the hit and passing it to ground via. the primary surge protectors on the ARD transformers. Us folks on URD do not have that luxury.

I am currently (pardon the pun) in the process of re-writing this FAQ »AT&T Southeast Forum FAQ »How can I protect my DSL/dialup equipment from surges? to make it more relevant to Ham radio and will submit for inclusion to the FAQ’s here once completed. In the mean time I have included a couple PDF attachments from my employer on grounding and bonding. Just a little light reading to keep ya busy for now.

Wayne