I took care of your avatar.

What I did was drag n drop to my desktop from the naw site, then click on profile and uploaded. I should say thats what you would do as I'm the admin an can do this for other users

On the grounding and lightning I have almost been hit more than once. Once at summer camp as a kid, I was in a field and stepped over a water pipe in the path which was in a field just as lighting hit it. About 4 others saw what looked by me being hit, I was about 3 feet ways and just felt a the hair on the back of my neck stand up

Another time at my home in mass, we were having a small party and I was telling people about the lightning strike that hit a tree about 200 ft from the property earlier in the week. A T strom was approaching and about 10 minutes later, about 75ft way another tree took a direct hit and exploded as we all watched

My concern here in florida is I have about 60 panels on the roof. Take what you did for your antenna and multiply by 60 from a work stand point to have safe grounding and you get the idea of whats involved. Also your antenna was grounded, but thru your ham coax. This is what attracted the lightning but was a feeble ground and you know the rest. Solar panels have no ground and the wiring is under the glass which is an insulator

Well, one can go back and forth forever on this topic, just my thoughts and I'm happy with what I have done, for now ...

Hi Folks,
The lightning discussion is a good reminder to not neglect protection. I outfitted solar to a fire lookout some years back and incorporated the rooftop aluminum solar rack into the copper cable grounding system that resembles how Niel did his place. The lookout has taken direct and indirect hits since then with no physical damage to the equipment, only some frazzled nerves, and more exciting stories.
The existing bare stranded copper cable looked to be about a 1/0, and I added multiple runs of #2 carried by the rack and panel structure down opposite corners of the building into the spiderweb-like ground.
Among others, this site has some clear basics: http://www.lightningrod.com/
Lynn

sg,
thanks for doing up the avatar and i don't get to work with such stuff or pics so i am relatively green on those type things. one other point to correct you on is that with the coax disconnected from the radio and the ground wire cut there wasn't any ground at all at that point and was just a bunch of metal in the air with a wire leading into the house just as pvs would be at your house.
lynn,
it is unusual to find anybody else say they went as far as i did. i see you are in agreement with me on the grounding not so much attracting the lightning, but more dissipating the lightning. when there's a bunch of metal in the air, that attracts the lightning as it acts like a capacitor storing up charges until it can overcome the resistance of the air and it discharges in a flash of static or lightning, depending on the size of the discharge. the fact that aluminum is fairly low resistance to electrical flow doen't help matters. we both probably have or had better soil too so that could be a big problem where sandy or rocky soils are encountered as somebody did ask on naws for grounding in rocky terrain. it's very difficult to do is an understatement and i advised him the large plate they had was good, but they needed to place wire radials out from it buried if possible and sink rods in anywhere they could as far in as they could. yup they were hit and the ground wasn't sufficiently large enough to handle the multiple strikes they got. i believe they said the metal plate was on the roof and in my reply i subtly said it needs to be on the ground.

sg,
something happened that has never happened to me before. when i hit submit for my last post it came up with a debugging error on it. i went back into the forum using the back button to see what was going on being it didn't show it was submitted and low and behold it posted at least 3 times and i don't know why as i had hit submit once. i deleted the extras.

I Think GoDaddy changed something with there email server, the failure is using the regular mail server for sending out the reply to topic email (when checked by a user of the thread)

I changed it to use PHP mail and no more error, Ah the joys of maintaining a site

ok i'm trying to post again and we'll see what happens.
lynn,
in your link that you posted they show an example of a house with multiple ground rods. they made a mistake in my opinion as they didn't tie these ground rods together in the soil with copper wire. problems do arise when they aren't tied and could even lead to electric shock or damage to tvs, refrigerators, etc. in a worst case scenario. i used #6 on mine, but thicker would've been better because of galvanic reactions to the wire. rust in laymens terms. this also needs to be solid and not multistranded. it is also good to know that when having 2 or more grounds that are in the soil and seperated by distance that these galvanic reactions from the soil could and usually do set up small electric generations much like that of a battery. most soils are acid and small differences set up this phenomena. this could also create what is known as a ground loop that has to do with high frequency ac and can wreck havoc with some radios and tvs with interference.
another thing about that wire connection in the soil between the ground rods is that it adds more contact area to the soil reducing the resistance to the earth and means that a strike is more apt to dissipate better as i'm sure you are very aware in your use of a spiderweb arrangement. this wire could be placed shallowly, but i recommend at least a foot or more down preventing accidentally cutting the wire through gardening or other type mishaps like driving in a mail box post. i actually read somewhere that the 8ft ground really doesn't meet nec standards due to ground resistivity and its limited contact area with the soil. i lost the website long ago in a computer crash, but if memory serves me i think it needed to be 18ft long to meet it for average soils and many don't have average soil. i don't think they forced it beyond 8ft because of difficulties in driving the rods in. hasn't anybody ever thought how they ground a skyscraper? it's definitely not with an 8ft ground rod.
btw one last note on the tying together of these rods is to keep it at least a foot away from your home and never try to put it under or through your home like under basements or crawl spaces as this would bring lightning into the house. no shortcuts and no sharp turns in the wire. also lynn, don't think i'm talking down to you as i'm trying to talk to others simultaneously to inform them what you and i may already know.