Ad Astra Observatory

Well, I finally got the observatory grounded.

After consulting the ham radio online forums, I came away with another plan of attack, and after measuring between the two existing rods, one of which will be getting cut off ahorter after the inspection, but that’s another show; I found them to be 13′ apart, huzzah, I can put in another rod in between, drive it in as far as the head-of-the-class Southeast grounding rod, you don’t get a name, sorry, and bada boom, bada bing, Bob’s your uncle, you got yourself a grounding electrode, at least six feet between rods, per NEC 250, of at least 2005.

The hams often suggested water jet. Contraption, garden hose, ten minutes flat, etc.

Yeah, this is glacial till. Bunch of silt and roundy rocks that got tumbled along a riverbed, then had a glacier sit on it, mmm, compact. It’s rocks, all the way down. From silt to sand to pebble and all he rest.

M_ and I did a cheap-by-comparison Home Depot run, and set to work.

What followed was nine hours of painstaking manual labor. Getting through the topsoil was fairly straightforward. At one point, we put in tape marks to measure he depth we needed to hit.

At the 24″ left to go mark, we probably should have quit. But we were going to beat the drill. John Henry is smiling down upon us.

We got the thing done.

Because the grounding rods all need to be bonded together, running the ground wire was pretty simple.

There’s a special, tiny knockout in the panel case, for #4 wire to go through.

Connecting the grounding cable to the isolated ground bus in the panel (keep neutral and ground separate in subpanels) completed the job of wiring the observatory for mains electricity.

Off to schedule the inspection.