New ham here, trying to get my station finally setup in a permanent fashion. For HF, I'm going to be using an ICOM IC-7000 with an AH-4. I think we have a few people here using the AH-4 so I was hoping someone could answer a few questions on grounding for it.


I currently have an 8' ground rod driven in by the side of my house, connected to an entrance panel for the coax cables there. The entrance panel has ICE / Morgan arrestors (1 for HF, 1 for control lines, to be used with the AH-4 tuner cable for now, and one for UHF/VHF later). The AH-4 will be permanently mounted to the corner of the house on that side of the house, two stories up (just under the roof line) with a wire running out to some trees at the back of the yard. For the ground terminal on the AH-4, would it be fine if I ran that to the existing ground rod?


I'm not entirely understanding how much RF is going to be emitted from the ground terminal of the AH-4. I believe its ground does become an active RF emitter and part of the antenna. If that ground was connected to that ground rod, it would also be connected to the shields of all the cables entering the house. That ground rod is also bonded to the house ground so that may all start to have RF on it. Should the ground terminal on the AH-4 be run to a separate ground rod, that isn't bonded to the rest of the grounds? Also, should the ground cable coming off of it be insulated? I currently have a good deal of 6 gauge bare copper, but if it's going to be "hot", then I can't use that. I'm not sure how much insulation would be needed on that to make it safe. The maximum amount of power I could put into the AH-4 is 100 watts.


Thanks for any advice!

While I agree with the above about the loop antenna, given a random wire antenna, the ground side of the tuner becomes part of the antenna. For this, a wire or wires need to run from the ground terminal on the tuner away from (opposite direction) of the 'hot' wire. With both wires in the air, the ends of the wires become high voltage points.(Tape well and insulate) Grounding one of those won't work out well and may cause problems. Grounding one end of a dipole antenna will shift the current lobe of the antenna and may cause high (er) voltage at the tuner. In this case, where the tuner is at the center of the dipole, the shield of the feed line ought to be grounded before it enters the house. A suitable lightning protection device for the coax would be a big help. If you can get a loop up 30 feet or better, go for it and ground the coax before it enters the house. Let us know how it works. 73, Rob

I have run this exact random wire configuration with an SG239 and it worked quite well. Not as good as the dipole it eventually turned into, but still very well.

Here in this RV park I have a random wire inverted V up at 40' and my SG-230 uses the water supply system pipes as my counterpoise. Works pretty well.

I believe you should be OK with your random wire configuration, however you will still need a counterpoise that is electrically larger than a single ground rod. The counterpoise serves as the other half of your antenna, so it needs to be at least as 'big' electrically.

The loop is still your 'all around - no muss - no fuss solution'.