mike43 wrote: My place has high end electrical safety thanks to the council and everything is on a trip.
The problem with adding earth stakes
if your home has what is called Protective Multiple Earthing, PME is that your house trip switch does not always behave as it should when a fault occurs in the wider system, if you add an earth inside your homes electrical system without getting professional advice, or thinking it through carefully, then if something goes wrong, you or someone else could die.
The RSGB use to do a really good basic PME leaflet. But all I can find now are ones that do little to help explain why we need to take care. However the following is part of the BRATS advanced amateur radio training syllabus.
9d Protective multiple earthing
9f.1 Recall that in PME systems the main earth terminal is connected to the neutral of the electricity service at the consumers' premises and that all metal pipes and fittings within the premises are also connected to the PME bonding point.
Recall that under severe fault conditions PME systems have the potential to cause fatal electric shocks and/or fires in amateur radio stations.
In brief, this method of electricity supply involves bonding all of the house metalwork together, and this will include any radio earth you have provided.
With the ATU, I very occasionally use one for SWL'ing & they can be helpful, I think. But they are not always helpful if you are just tuning around the bands, as you need to retune every few hundred khz.
My main SWL ATU is a Global model, which has band pass filters & adjustable Q, so I can not just optimise the signal that I want, but also filter out a lot of unwanted rubbish too.
My SEM (amateur radio) ATU has a noise bridge, which is great for SWL'ing, as it allows me to easily tune the antenna with no transmitted RF.
But I am split on ATU's for SWL. They can make a difference, but they are really only of any help, if you are listening to one small segment of spectrum & I like to tune around & I am not totally convinced that an ATU makes a big difference any how.
I really like my Global because I can filter out of band noise out & almost notch out unwanted close by stations using the Q adjustment.
With dog legging an antenna, it makes some difference but not much, if any in the real world.
My loft antenna is zig zagged all over the place & still works reasonably well. The SWR is higher than it should be on some bands, but it still RX's & TX's very well concidering how much I have compromised it zig zagging it around my loft.


When I pop my short wire up, that is when using my Eton Global. I just hang it up around the room & always seem to get good service from that. I normally crocodile clip the wire to the retracted telescopic antenna.
Here in Norwich I could get a rod deep into the soil. But when I lived in the Hunstanton area, I had chalk at about 2.5 feet below the ground. Do what you can, but don't compromise your safety by feeling that you need to add a earth stake, or feel that without an earth rod your station is compromised.
Get what you can from the hobby. But beyond a portable radio & a short telescopic antenna, everything else is a bonus.
And remember, if you do not connect your radio to the mains, then you can safely use all the earth rods that you want, regardless of what earthing system your home uses, as your radio will never become part of the electrical earthing system. Plus batteries isolates you from all that mains borne interference.