I have read so much on station grounding that I think I am getting myself turned around. So if there's no such thing as RF ground, should I still ground all of my equipment chassis to a bus bar? And what should I connect that to...The ground (as in dirt)? If my shack is on the second floor... house ground?

(Not talking about lightning protection here... that's obvious. Just general safety and good practice.)

@Geojoek I've run "floating" stations many times. I'm doing it right now. (Second floor, very old house, no grounds anywhere to be found). If you ignore DC grounding / lightning protection, I wouldn't bother with a common grounding bus-bar or earth ground. It will work fine if and only if what's at the far end of the coax is matched and absorbs or radiates all the RF that the transmitter sends up the coax. If not, and RF is coming back on the shield of the coax, you'll have problems ranging from RF burns to computer upsets. As an extra measure I usually use a "coax choke balun" at the shack end of the coax. This is usually some number of turns, like 8, on an FT240-43 toroid to choke off any small amounts of RF that the coax shield might pick up by radiation from the antenna. I also use FT-140-43 cores around the shack on mouse, keyboard, video, headphone, USB cables to catch any stray RF and to stop those devices from interfering with the radio.

@shuttersparks

Thank you! I run "floating" a lot when I have my portable station set up at home, but this is for something more permanent. I'm taking care of lightning protection outside the shack with arrestors, ground rods, bonding to house grounds, etc., and will have a choke balun (13 bifilar turns around a 240) where my balanced open wire feed meets coax outside the shack. I was just unclear how much those might mitigate any static build up, and/or general electrical safety inside shack.

@Geojoek I've only had a static buildup problem one time, but it was impressive. I'd put up a vertically oriented full-wave 80 meter delta loop and fed it with homebrew 4-inch open wire line. This was in the high desert of Southern Nevada, very dry air.

Nearly the installation. Went out the next day with my 8 year-old son who was helping, and I heard a loud regular Snap! Snap! Snap! with a bright blue spark at the feedthrus going into the building. My son reached for the wires, I yelled NO!, but he didn't listen. Knocked him on his ass and scared him.

To calm him I began to explain what was happening, that the dry wind was generating static on the antenna, and that a static shock like that is painful but harmless. So I too touched it. Helluva wallop. It really hurt. Felt it all the way to my right shoulder. There's quite a lot of capacitance.

So what to do? I simply installed static drain resistors both both legs of the feedline to ground. 2 watt carbons. Don't remember what value I chose. I think I calculated it by calculating the voltage on the 600 ohm feeder at 3.5 kW and chose a value that consumed 1 watt of that power.