[jcassity]

I'll expand on my earlier comments.

A while back i was having electrical interference on all my sets and finally solved hat issue.
in the meantime while this was an active problem i set out to solve it.

on my philco and 3 other small units i wired in a small 120v AC relay. the relay is downstream of the fuse. I would bring the Hot and N leg over to the relay.

I disconnected the wire leading to the antenna hook up terminal and brought that over to the relay "common".
I installed a new wire from the relay "NO" contact over to the antenna long wire hook up.
what i achieved on each radio whats its ability to automatically connect & disconnect itself from the antenna.

later when i found my issue in the house i took the relays out and converted to something more even more simple.
I use a 10pos rotary switch to select which radio i want to listen to in the garage.,, yet the long wire comes to this switch on the common terminal.

one thing i am *not doing* is using a ground rod.
there are three ways to do a ground for the radios, yet one is somewhat not exactly NEC compliant , all manuals so to do it.

---doing a dedicated ground for your radios would be considered a separately derived ground per the NEC, yet who really cares right?
in my garage when i did do a 10' copper clad steel rod, and connected up to my sets.. the reception went "down" ,, or maybe its to the ear the DB level? I also had some hum noise. I noticed no net gain but seemed like the right thing to do... yet i abandoned it for another choice.
Also after process of elimination i found 2 of my radios "if plugged in was back feeding my ground rod. I flipped the AC input legs in the set (minerva tropic master) even though it was right and the results were the same.

The lessons i learned about doing a long wire antenna to service multiple radios leads me to one common challenge.....

*you better make darn sure you have resolved any hot chassis issues in any of your sets before bonding all these sets to a common single ground.

around the same time i was solving my own issues i saw a topic here, a debate actually, on the usefulness / advantages / disadvantages of integrating a 3 prong outlet to all radios no matter what they are. I was planning out a way to get all my sets to a 3 prong situation when some of the seasoned people here started making good points about when it should or should not be done.

again all this stuff i am rattling on about ties into a useful long wire antenna performance characteristics.

at this point, since my philco and my minerva both induce a back feed voltage on my antenna while plugged in but in the "off" state, I opted for no ground rod at all. i am just using a long wire antenna that leads to a rotary switch. within the rotary switch there is some degree of coupling from other sets but the are electrically isolated from one another , ,, which was the easy way for me to solve the problems of other radios that are "off" not interfering with the radio that i want to be "on".

To the telephone wire thing... im must absorbing other peoples results,,, never tried it nor did i know to. whats interesting is the wires are twisted pairs ,,
Another is if your a buried phone service and you happen to have a fairly long run on somewhat level ground, if you could get to the other end , you have the ability to make a somewhat functional beverage antenna if your able to install the small parts on either end of that pair of wires.