I have been, or should I say, my equipment has been directly hit 3 times by lightning. The first time, was about 30 years ago, in Las Vegas. If you have ever been there, you know they have insane amounts of rain a couple times a year, and I had a 30ft tower up in my backyard, with a Shakespeare "Super Big Stick" on top, and a ground plane scanner antenna on a stand off. I had a small mobile CB connected with RG58 coax. The storm hit while I was gone, and I came home and wasn't thinking about it until a minute before it hit. I was in the room next to where the CB was, and suddenly, there was a big bang, and a flash. The CB, power supply and my new SWR meter were smoking, and totally destroyed. Outside, it was raining fiberglass. All the IC's inside the CB had their tops blown off, and inside them was.. nothing.
The second time was back in Ohio, and another Big Stick got hit, and again, there was fiberglass all over the neighborhood, but I got off cheap since only the antenna and coax were zapped.
The third time, there was a tremendously loud bang, and my satellite reeceiver had been hit, destroying it. It was a replacement for one that had ben zapped by a near hit a few months before.
I have had several surges, destroying things from modems to UPS's, to an old Pro-2022 scanner, to a phone. I live within about a 1/4 mile of a large river, and even closer are several high tension towers, so there are better targets for it to hit, but I still have at least one near miss a year that does something.
