Surge protection on VHF marine equipment, will a UPS work?

[ncschult]

I help out a group that has Marine VHF radios and AIS receivers at different locations.

Occasionally they would get some kind of electrical surge that would damage the WinRadio receivers.

We started putting in coax surge protectors but they are difficult to ground at most locations.

We also used APC UPS battery backup units that have coaxial cable protection.
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Has anyone ever used one of these as a surge protector between the antenna and VHF radio equipment?

I'm curious if there will be great signal loss using the UPS vs. the Inline surge protector

 

[mmckenna]

I've never used one for a radio install. Used one once for a cable TV connection, but I doubt it did anything that wasn't already taken care of by the cable tv company.

Since these are designed for cable TV/off the air TV antennas, they are set up for 75 ohm impedance. I wouldn't transmit through it, but it might work OK for receive only. Just keep in mind that the UPS unit will want to see a ground connection, or it'll probably show an alarm.

Considering cable TV signals run up towards 1gHz, you should be OK at VHF.

It does raise a question in my mind. If I was in your shoes, I'd want to know where the energy is coming from and I'd deal with it directly. If you are getting a static electricity build up on your antenna, sounds like it's not properly grounded. Lightning protection would be something else I'd want. If the surges are coming in through the AC power feed, you'd really want to deal with that.

The whole antenna grounding and coax protection discussion could take up pages. Making sure it all meets electric code would be something I'd be concerned about, too.