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+--- Thread: Grounding and antenna placement dilemma (/showthread.php?tid=1999)
Grounding and antenna placement dilemma - hazet - 2016-10-13
Hello
How to find a good connection in a multi appartment building on the 3rd floor? Can I connect my blue system to the grounding wire of the house electric installation? What is recommended to do in my case? Where to put the E-field antenna in my appartement? Would it be sufficient to put it behind a window?
Thanks for helpful hints!
Cheers
Hans
RE: Grounding and antenna placement dilemma - BlackRockShooter - 2016-10-13
(2016-10-13, 13:16)hazet Wrote: How to find a good connection in a multi appartment building on the 3rd floor? Can I connect my blue system to the grounding wire of the house electric installation? What is recommended to do in my case?
Hey hoo, please use the metal water pipe for grounding. or the pipe from the radiator if you have one
the house electric grounding is no recommendable....
i hope i could help at least a little bit
RE: Grounding and antenna placement dilemma - hazet - 2016-10-14
Hi Blackrockshooter
No waterpipe available nearby.
I don't intend to put wiring to the watertap in the bathwoom.
What else to do?
Cheers Hans
RE: Grounding and antenna placement dilemma - BlackRockShooter - 2016-10-14
(2016-10-14, 04:51)hazet Wrote: Hi Blackrockshooter
No waterpipe available nearby.
I don't intend to put wiring to the watertap in the bathwoom.
What else to do?
Cheers Hans
Try to run the system without grounding.... Sometimes there is no grounding needed.
If the noise level is too hight then you have no other chance....
But be careful when you install / use the electric groundig
Cheers
RE: Grounding and antenna placement dilemma - piepants - 2016-10-15
I used an electrical outlet for my system, but it probably depends on where you live and the electrical rules as to how well this works. In Australia, the house earth is connected to a ground stake, and all water pipes. In my case the metal shed where the controller is located is grounded, so I just connected to the frame.
I ran my E-field in a window for testing and it worked great, but it all depends how much interference you have nearby, and what is generating it. Depending on your location, E field or H field could work better. Try both
RE: Grounding and antenna placement dilemma - DrRobin - 2016-10-19
I use the electrical earth for my system blue. It is in the loft (attic) and I ran a thick earth wire down to the main earth point at the fuse box/consumer unit, as there is no earth in my attic. Without an earth, my E-field antenna was useless, but the H-field antennas (ferrite rods) worked okay.
The E-field antenna will work inside, just try to get it as far away from other electrical devices, otherwise it might pick up too much noise. When my E-field antenna was inside (in the attic) or low down it wasn't very sensitive and didn't pick up too many strokes. The ferrite rods work well inside, so if you have limited space and no where to mount an E-field antenna outside two ferrite rods will probably work better.
Robin
RE: Grounding and antenna placement dilemma - allsorts - 2016-10-19
Hummmmmm...... I shall have to try an earth on my system considering the improvement given in your report elsewhere. It'll only be the electrical earth picked up from the lighting circuit(s) in the loft. Getting to the MET would be tricky but not impossible. Enclosed the E-field board and 90 mm of thick copper wire probe yesterday, it's now wire down from the ridge board in the loft. Does catch the occasional signal that I don't think is a local switching transient but it also gets a fair bit of MSF on 60 kHz, the other VLF transmitters aren't obvious.
RE: Grounding and antenna placement dilemma - hazet_CHAM - 2016-10-20
Hello
I'm using the grounding of my appartment electric installation since a day. The interference is reduced significantly.
Today I expect the delivery of the IC filters to be put on the Blue controller board. . . . I'm expecting a significant improvement of the signal quality. Let's see!
Cheers Hans
RE: Grounding and antenna placement dilemma - Dale.Reid - 2016-10-21
I have the good fortune to have a nice ground rod just outside my basement wall, which I connect to with the ground for both Blue and Red.
When the RED board was in testing state on my dining room table I had either no ground, or grounded through my home's electrical system.
Admittedly, it is a single family dwelling with good electrician's installation may have made this a more dependable ground than what someone living in an older building or apartment where the ground had been patched around from revision to the home or apartment over time.
As an additional point, one of the longer functioning stations with an excellent history of strike participations uses a house ground for his station.
RE: Grounding and antenna placement dilemma - allsorts - 2016-10-21
Added a supply ground connection to my controller today. Doesn't appear to have made any difference at all to the H-field, but then Anthorn drowns out almost anything unless a null is aimed at it.
I think adding the ground connection does remove MSF 60 KHz from the E-field. I say think, as the interference is not there all the time it comes and goes over a period of a few tens of seconds and as it comes/goes there will be a few signal windows with the present/absent transition stepping to the left between each sample. What I think is happening is the 1 ms sample window is drifting against the on/off (off being 200 or 400 ms in every second IIRC) 60 kHz carrier. As with everything else here the beat signal between Anthorn on 19.6 and Skelton on 22.1 is present.