"w_tom" wrote in message
...
Many people forget their primary school science. They
assume destructive transients enter as if ocean waves.
Crashing and damaging only that one location. Reality: it is
electricity. Electricity first flows through everything in
the circuit. Only then does something (or many things) in
that circuit fail. The poster 'feels' that the pre-amp will
stop or block what 3 miles of sky could not? How silly.

Sacrificial protection is the classic myth. One more
reason why. It would take milliseconds or longer for the
pre-amp to become an open circuit. A destructive transient
does damage in microseconds. Even the fastest 'sacrificial'
protector - a fast blow fuse - takes tens of milliseconds to
blow. Where is protection provided by a pre-amp? Mythical
once we apply numbers.


While it will not protect from a direct hit it may help from the spikes
produced by near by flashes. I have a radio repeater on top of a mountain
and the phone line connected to it is my biggset problem . I installed a
couple of very low amp fuses and a couple of coils after them. The fuses
blow often after a thunder storm but they do protect the other equipment.
No doubt that a direct hit would take out everything.