On Aug 21, 10:09 am, "Eisboch" wrote:
"Richard Casady" wrote in message

...



You evidently think a lightning rod will somehow increase the danger,
but such has been proven by long experience not to be the case. BS in
other words. The lightning rod doesn't know or care what is under it.
It prevents strikes in a 90 degree cone under it. Works equally well
for buildings, boats, and powerlines.

Casady

I think we are talking two different concepts here.

A lightning rod is designed to be "the" point of strike, should one occur
and equipped with sufficiently sized conductors to discharge the strike to
ground.
.
I am talking about making the building, boat, or whatever less favorable to
the strike.

It has to do with the positive column .... based on the static charge that
builds on the ground point.

Eisboch

Wiki has a good discussion of Lightning rods and basically the theory
of preventing a strike by dissipating charge from the ground is very
controversial. Like Eisboch, I have some familiarity with HV and
large electrical sparks, My graduate work was on electrical particle
charging by very high electric fields to improve electrostatic
precipitators. My experience with this is that things like so-called
lightning dissipators tend to increase the likelyhood of attracting a
spark. I am not certain this experience can be generalized to
lightning but such dissipators do not seem to work well in practice
any better than conventional lightning rods.
The safe approach would seem to be to have a very good conducting path
with few bends going to a large grounded conductor.
I do not think that those sintered metal plates used to ground radios
will work to replace a large area conductor for lightning. The
electric fields inside the pores of those plates will essentially be
zero so that the actual area for the purpose of dissipating a
lightning strike will basicall be the outside surface area that is
fairly small.