I live in southern Mississippi. Last Tuesday (Mardi Gras) night, I was
listening to the BBC on my Super ATS-909. A light, drizzly rain had been
falling for about an hour.

I was wearing a light pair of Sony digital-grade headphones, because my wife
was watching the news on television in the same room.

All of a sudden, a huge flash (our sitting area overlooks the lake we live
on -- and has large picture windows) and an ENORMOUS "KABOOM!!!" happened.
No other thunder (or lightning) happened, before or after -- this was the
only strike. Now I really understand that this is the kind of event that
kills golfers.

Our kids came running downstairs, asking us what had happened. I opened our
front door, and saw a "striped" longleaf pine with steam coming off of it,
and knew immediately that we had just experienced a serious lightning
strike.

That tree was right at 50 feet away from the spot that my "random-wire"
antenna goes out of my bedroom window, and winds around the house, hidden on
the back of the soffit.

The Super 909 was still alive, but lightning did find its way into our phone
line (we have underground utilities), killing the dial-up modem and the
keyboard in my wife's computer and the network interface cards in both my
daughter's and my computer. I also had to replace the fuses in our alarm
system. Since NIC cards are cheap, and we use DSL (don't need the dialups)
I was able to recover from this by investing about an hour's work and less
than $30.00 for new NICs.

I was thankful that my Super 909 survived, and I e-mailed Chris Justice at
RadioLabs to let him know what had transpired. As it turns out, he actually
DID make a modification that may have kept the radio from getting zapped!

Here's his response to my note:

"You don't have a clue how lucky you are! Serious. I went to a Lightning
engineering course at Poly Phaser in Nevada for 7 days to study the effects
of lightning and what paths are travelled. If that longwire was only 50'
from where your wire was, you are damned lucky!"

"The damage that you mentioned is not from a line getting struck, but rather
from the ground suddenly becoming an above ground source.... In other words,
the "Ground" that everything else in the house is attached to started
raising to a potential of 1000 - 50,000 volts. The damage occurs when the
telephone, cable, electrical and all of the other lines still stay at their
same normal potential.... 110 volts, 24 volts and cable TV ground.... So,
you see the problem. The 1000 - 50,000 volt charge tries to escape through
the little life lines to your house. So............ BOOM! IF that would have
come down your longwire and into your headphones, I as well as your family
would be very very upset right now. So, you are one lucky guy!"

"I am suprised though. You helped me out in a geek kind of way. I installed
a diode shunt on the front end of the Super 909's antenna jack, before the
RF amplifier. If the lightening struck that close, I know that the ambient
static voltage on that wire was quite high, enough to blow out the front end
FET... So, most likely it worked. Thanks for risking your life to test the
909... I appreciate it!"

So that's my little story -- I thought I'd share it with you guys.

-- Stinger
Super 909 Lightning Tester
;^)


"N8KDV" wrote in message
...
Thunderstorm season seems to be starting early this year. Currently have
some cells moving across Lake Michigan, kicking up a bit of a racket on
the MW band as I listen to WLS 890 (50 kw blowtorch) in Chicago.

Steve
Holland, MI
Drake R7, R8 and R8B

http://www.iserv.net/~n8kdv/dxpage.htm