These pictures show the fallacy or myth that simply disconnecting an antenna makes a system safe, and that severe damage to an antenna is always from a direct hit on the antenna.
This damage illustrates why wide or heavy bonding conductors are necessary, and why an entrance panel bonded to the power mains entrance is necessary for protection.
This is the strike area, the top of a tree. It actually blew the tree top apart.
The path down the tree blew bark off.
At the root, the lightning blew a big hole in the dirt.
A standard letter size paper fits the hole.
The path from the tree went over about 20-30 feet. It look like a large mole tunnel.
At the center bottom the soil is lifted like a big mole tunnel!
Below the Beverage antenna, lightning made another hole. It actually melted the #14 copperweld beverage wire in two.
(This is a temporary splice to keep the wire out of the way of animals and people while it was repaired.)
You can see the melted ends. About a foot or two of wire was missing, and the steel core of this wire was magnetized with long sections of thick copper cladding blown off!
This area of the antenna was about 8 feet above ground, suspended in open air. The lightning jumped out of the trench it made, and had no problem forming a path from wire to ground over the eight foot air gap between ground and the wire in the air!
This very clearly was not a hit on the antenna itself. The route of the energy was marked by lifted soil about 20-30 feet long to the tree.
This is the antenna feedpoint about 200-300 feet from the melted area.
The explosion actually expanded the box!!
A melted area around the antenna washer is visible.
Even with the coaxial cable connected to the receiver multi-coupler, my radios all connected, and no lighting arrestors, there was no damage in the house or other buildings.
This is the inside of the box at the feedpoint of the Beverage. It looked like an M-80 went off inside.
The force actually unbent the formed aluminum box.
In my opinion, this shows why disconnecting an antenna will not protect equipment or a house from a close strike, let alone a direct strike on an antenna. Lighting had no problem at all melting the antenna wire in half, and blowing the feedpoint box apart, even with 20-30 feet of gap.
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