My question is if I use a battery powered scanner will that make much difference in the overall safety of the system? It seems to me that if I eliminate AC voltage from the system it will be much safer all around.
What do you guys think?
Using a battery operated radio with an outside antenna will only be a little bit (well, a micro bit at best) safer than an AC powered radio with an outside antenna. First off, if you get hit by a direct lightning strike the lightning may flow down your antenna wire into your house and jump into whatever it can find to dissipate to ground.
Yes, grounding the antenna and using lightning protection on your coax is important (very important in fact), but you can't count on it to be 100% effective. Let's say that it works quite well and 95% of the million amps flows directly to your ground. The remaining 50,000 amps can still do quite a bit of damage. Don't think that simply disconnecting the antenna during a lightning storm will save you either (although it's probably still a good idea). The lightning just jumped several miles through nothing but moist air, a few feet more once inside your house won't faze it much.
We had an indirect strike several years ago (it didn't hit the house, but did hit a neighbor's tree) that caused a fair amount of damage to electronics in the house. There was no external antenna at the time so that wasn't a factor. One thing I did notice which I wasn't expecting was the strike managed to spot weld the washer to the dryer (apparently part of the strike came down the dryer and jumped to the washer to flow through to the water pipes). Remember that this was an indirect strike so the damage was just from a large amount of electricity flowing through the air into my home's electric, phone, and cable-tv lines that were all properly grounded and buried between the house and their connection to the utility companies lines.
I tend to ask obvious answer questions at times.
