>>110094>>110152>>110161>>110167>>110821Electrician fag here
In theory you could have either a metal pole or a coil of wire (probably 8 gauge or larger) and use it to protect yourself from lightning, however:
--It would be really heavy for backcountry hiking
--It would probably only be useful in an area with no cover or trees (desert/tundra) where a person would be likely to be directly hit by lightning
--you would not want to be holding it/close to it when a storm rolls in, since while it would stop lightning from passing directly through you (and that would be marginally better than having it pass directly through you) it is still very very bad for you to be close to a lightning strike.
--unless you carry a tripod or some other stabilizer for this you're going to probably be relying on the environment (saplings, rocks, cacti, whatever) for some way to keep your pole upright in a storm or get your coil off the ground.
If you were going to apply this idea, the best way to do it would be to set up your lightning rod or metal coil as you soon as you saw a storm rolling in, then move at least 300ft (~~100M) away from the thing and wait out the storm. Or set it up when you set up camp if a thunderstorm is likely to move in during the night.
Probably where this would make the most sense is in an established campground in an area that thunderstorms are likely, there is little cover so humans are a likely target for lightning strikes, and the setup would be in place permanently to protect campers from lightning. Of course then you have just a regular fucking lightning rod, which is nothing special and already widely used.
