Grounding your radio
It seems that everyone thinks a radio should always be grounded to work or for best performance. That is actually not true. Grounding is a complicated issue. Indiscriminate grounds for no real reason tend to hurt more than they help! Grounding a radio to an isolated ground rod is definitely not a wise thing to do regardless of who says it is. Old radio manuals always showed the radio connected to a ground rod. Nobody asked why. Yes, there was a reason back in the early 20th century when most radio antennas needed the ground as a return path for antenna current. For example a crystal radio when connected to a random end fed wire would magically come to life when the G terminal was connected to a ground rod! Even today end fed wires will not work without some return path. That return path could be an earth ground rod connection. Doing so needs to be done right or it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen! Some new radio manuals still show a connection to ground. I can ...