[time-nuts] Best location for a GPS antenna...?

[Jim Lux]

On 4/12/12 12:50 PM, lists at lazygranch.com wrote:
> I'd suggest getting Dr. Uman's "All About Lightning" as a starter. You could read it in an afternoon, so to be correct, the book is all about lightning, but it doesn't contain all the world's knowledge. ;-).  It isn't very technical, though he has written technical books as well.
>
An excellent book, as is the Dover book "Lightning".


> Regarding schemes to prevent lightning hits, they are all controversial. That is, scientists argue over the effectiveness. The one I see often in the high desert looks like a brush made out of metal fibers.
>

Controversial is an understatement.
When there was an IEEE journal paper (well reviewed) essentially saying 
that they don't work, one of the manufacturers of such devices sued the 
author and the IEEE (unsuccessfully).

The same manufacturer proudly proclaims "as used by NASA and the US Air 
Force" when what really happened is that both bought them as test 
articles, for tests which failed.  There's a great picture of a 
lightning bolt coming down from the sky, skipping the top of the tower 
and hitting the "lightning eliminator" square in the middle of the panel.



> I've got to see ground hits in the desert twice. Amazing. The spot hit glows yellow, which I presume is sodium ionization.

Or, "yellow heat" as in blackbody radiation.. it gets hot enough to fuse 
sand into glass (fulgurites) and it takes a while to cool off.  Some 
years back, I was trying to make artificial fulgurites in my back yard 
with large high voltage capacitor banks (hey, quarter shrinking gets 
boring after a while).


>