The ground path problem.
Most surge protectors protect two wires. Bantam protects three, including the one your digital equipment depends on most. Conventional protection treats the ground conductor as a place to dump surge energy. Bantam filters it the same way it filters Line and Neutral.
One conductor, two jobs that pull against each other.
The safety ground serves two purposes, and power protection sits right where they collide.
A safety return path
Its primary job, written into the National Electrical Code, is a low-impedance fault-current return to the panel that protects against electric shock. It must be uninterrupted.
NEC: must stay continuousA zero-volt reference
Its second job is the baseline every digital circuit measures against. Each processor, memory array, and signal line sets a voltage relative to ground, the line that lets a chip tell a one from a zero.
~100 mV noise = bit errorsThey solve a Line-and-Neutral problem by ruining the reference.
A conventional protector is wired to divert surge energy away from the Line-to-Neutral path and toward Ground. This is the intended design. Clamping devices across the Line-to-Ground and Neutral-to-Ground pairs dump transient energy onto the safety ground conductor, where it propagates back through the building wiring toward the panel.
From a shock-protection standpoint, that is acceptable. From a digital-signal-integrity standpoint, it is a serious problem. The very energy the protector diverts away from Line and Neutral is deposited directly onto the ground reference that digital electronics depend on. A protector built this way is, by construction, corrupting the signal it was meant to preserve.
This is also the primary mechanism of Power Line Exfiltration: an attacker harvests electromagnetic signals from the building's ground conductor to reconstruct data from air-gapped systems. A protector that dumps surge energy to ground does not suppress those signals. It amplifies the activity on the very conductor an attacker would target.
Watch the voltage land on the ground conductor.
Same surge event, two designs. The trace is the voltage appearing on Ground, the line your electronics use as their zero-volt baseline.
The diverted surge lands on the safety ground and propagates back through the building wiring. Ground voltage swings far past the ~100 mV data-error threshold, and the activity an exfiltration attacker would target is amplified, not suppressed.
It filters Ground in series, the same as everything else.
Bantam's patented circuit places inductors in series on the Ground conductor, exactly as it does on Line and Neutral. Rather than diverting energy to ground, the circuit absorbs and reshapes it within the magnetic field of the inductors and releases it at the load's natural consumption rate. Ground sees no dump. The reference signal stays stable.
The circuit is also bi-directional on all three conductors. It stops signals generated by connected devices from propagating back onto the building wiring, and it stops signals on the building wiring from reaching connected devices. That two-way behavior is what makes it effective against ordinary power-quality problems and against PLE at the same time.
Ground gets the same series inductor as everything else.
A series inductor sits on all three conductors, Ground included, and each works in both directions: nothing from the building reaches your equipment, and nothing from your equipment leaks back onto the line.
The reference your electronics trust stays stable.
Bantam filters Line, Neutral, and Ground in series and in both directions. Nothing is diverted onto the conductor your processors use as their zero-volt baseline, so data stays intact, and there is nothing extra on the line for an attacker to harvest.
Continue the case: Magnetic decoupler →
