What it amounts to is that you can't -prevent- a lightning strike, but you can ~re-direct~ it to some place other than your home/equipment. That means that you provide an 'easier' path to follow rather than into your stuff. It's all about current flowing, and current 'like' the path of least resistance (maybe using 'impedance' rather than 'resistance' would be a better word to use in the case of radio stuff). If it's easier for current to follow a conductor of some kind -into- your 'stuff' rather than to ground/earth, then it's going to take it. Lightning isn't confined to only one path, it can and will take any/all that are available to it. So you provide a 'path of least resistance' to someplace other than your home and what it contains. Lightning is probably the largest current flow you can imagine so what's doing the conducting of that current has to be able to handle that much current for brief periods of time. That means fairly large conductors. And then you have to provide an ending point, that 'someplace to go to', which is most cases means 'dirt'. And that means that more conductive dirt is better than highly non-conductive dirt. (There are ways of measuring how conductive dirt is, but most of us don't have that ability, unfortunately.)
You've probably figured out that while the 'idea' of re-directing lightning is 'simple', the 'doing' of it can be anything but simple. "Why the hell did I ever open that can of 'worms?", right? Protecting your self and equipment isn't all -that- difficult but isn't 'common knowledge', so go find the information you need. The NEC, National Electrical Code, the NFPA, National Fire Protection Agency, are just two places to do that looking and there are more. Most of the larger companies that 'do' lightning protection furnish a lot of information about how to go about it, check'em out.
And there's one last 'catch' to all this, every situation is different and may require different ways of doing that lightning protection. There are no "one size fit's all" thingys for this.
. . . . . .
How do commercial radio stations do all that lightning protection? Very basically they provide a direct path to ground that lightning finds to have very low resistance and that radio wave find to have very high resistance. A very 'selective' short to ground. It still isn't all that simple, but it certainly isn't impossible either.
I'd say 'have fun', but I seriously doubt if that's even possible...
- 'Doc