At 08:01 PM 9/19/99 -0700, you wrote:
>Recent threads on connectors and soldering and such brought this to mind...
>Heard this story from a Brit I know......
>

ROTFL!!

Speaking of ground rods: does anyone have a good explanation of why they
work? I have been trying to understand for the longest while how a 6' rod
stuck into the ground can provide a suitable return. Soil conductivity,from
what I could find on the web,doesn't get much better than 400
mS/meter.So,if my calculations are right, even placing a 1 meter sphere
totally under ground would still give you a resistance of about 1 ohm per
meter (distance between the two ground points that are involved in the
return path,assuming the other point was also a 1 meter sphere). So, if you
were,say, 1km from your substation,GND would give you 1 1kohm resistance,
still pretty high! Even if GND were as close as the nearest power
pole,we're still talking tens of ohms.

Sean


|
| Sean Breheny
| Amateur Radio Callsign: KA3YXM
| Electrical Engineering Student
\--------------=----------------
Save lives, please look at http://www.all.org
Personal page: http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/shb7
mailto:shb7@cornell.edu ICQ #: 3329174