New General class ham setting up my first HF station in a spare bedroom. New ham here. Trying to get my HF station set up and have a grounding question. I have tried to research things as much as I can but am stuck on the shack/RF grounding. My coax comes in through the wall about 50 feet from where my equipment sits. I understand I need both safety grounding and RF grounding but I'm confused about implementation.

Do I need a separate ground rod outside the shack, or can I run heavy copper wire back to my antenna entrance point? All station equipment needs to be RF grounded to an external ground rod, bonded to each other, and bonded to the house ground. Without good RF grounding, you're going to get hum, noise, hash and other unwanted problems in your equipment and in your radio signals. My rig is an IC-7300 with an LDG tuner and Astron 30A supply.

The first challenge is that you really should have a proper ground rod with a short run of heavy duty cable to your main shack ground point. Then all equipment should be grounded to to that common point. And when I say all equipment, this MUST include your PC. Use #10 or larger copper wire and keep the runs as short as possible to minimize inductance at RF.

I had a similar setup and ran into RFI issues until I installed a dedicated 8-foot copper rod right outside the shack wall. Using 1/2 inch copper pipe and 1/2 inch braid is what I do on the inside. Others will probably chime in and make comments giving you some other ideas. Made a huge difference in received noise levels, especially on 40 and 80 meters.

Don't forget that station builders should avoid using the term RF ground in favor of the more general term bonding, which means keeping all equipment at the same RF voltage, not necessarily zero. You can bond equipment together at RF by connecting each piece of gear to a copper strap or pipe with a short piece of strap or wire. The goal is equipotential bonding, not a perfect zero-volt reference.