Hi folks,

I've recently installed a 1.8m antenna j-pole to roof-top, with a Blackhawk high gain antenna.

I've done a bit of searching around on Geekzone, and on the NZ related Internet in general, about the necessity (or not) of grounding antenna masts, and or using coaxial surge arresters. Whilst I've found a few companies selling SMA coaxial surge arresters in NZ (at a ridiculous price), I found very little to suggest either practice is recommended or necessary. One of the few threads I found on GZ about this, one or more people explicity recommended against grounding the antenna mast/pole.

Is that an accurate conclusion? That it's neither necessary nor recommended?

There's two parts to this:

1. Is there any need or advantage to ground the pole?

2. Is there any need or advantage to using a surge arrestor (something like one of these).

If it's not necessary or advised to use a surge arrestor, I'd rather not. As it's only going to add additional loss to the signal (even if it's minor, every bit of signal counts when the installation is 20km from the nearest cell mast).

But obviously, I don't want a storm to kill my modem, or destroy the antenna.

As an aside ... Living in Colorado many years ago (where grounding of masts was important), I lost a few devices to lightning surges through the powerlines; and in Panama I lost the ethernet and firewire ports on my computer  due to lightning. That incident included having my Macbook emanate white-blue light some inches out. The surge reached the computer through the Ethernet cable, via the cable modem. It was a nearby cable junction that took the lightning hit (we lost Internet for a couple of weeks after that). I'd unplugged the power, but hadn't considered that a lightening surge would reach me via the Ethernet wire. I was using the computer at the time, so it was rather hair-raising to have it blast out light as I quickly pulled my hands away from it. Another story from time in Colorado was that all the white plastic power sockets in the house would give off an orange glow when there was a lot of lightning around. The glow would pulse with each lightning blast. We had an off-grid PV solar system, and the cable running underground from the solar system to the house was about 150 ft long. We figured it was picking up static charge. Surge protectors on all electrical equipment and coaxial wires was an absolute must.

Cheers,

Jonathan