Big Bear short answer any ground is better than no ground at all use the steel cable if that all you got .
By putting it in the ground to keep from tripping over it will make it a better electrical ground.
Have fun play safe
Now for the rest of the story
Terry got this from the site you listed
Quote
A...David Buxton <David.Buxton@tek.com>
Newsgroups: alt.home.repair
Subject: Re: Ground aluminum siding?
Date: 16 Apr 1997
First of all, lightning rods are not designed to attract or conduct current from lightning. They are designed to dissapate and prevent the build up of the negative static charge that is necessary to cause a lightning strike. That is why they are made with a sharp point on the end. A sharp point on the end of a conductor will force ions into an ever-decreasing amount of space until their electrical potential forces them to "escape" or "jump" into the surrounding atmosphere thereby neutralizing the difference in potential of the lightning static field to ground.. If lightning rods were intended to be conductors of lightning, they would be spherical on top to retain, and therefore attract, as much of the opposite charge (negative), to lightning static field charge (positive). After all, in electricity, as in other things, opposites attract. The spherical top retaining a charge can be observed at work in a Van DeGraff (sp?) generator.
Also, if a lightning rod were meant to safely conduct the thousands and thousands of amps of a lightning strike, it would be a few feet in
diameter with a cable the diameter of a tree trunk running to a ground rod as big as the lightning rod. Anything else would melt under the demands of such a large current surge before the full charge was transmitted to the ground. All this, however, has little to do with the subject at hand. What course lightning (millions of volts) takes and what course standard household current (240/120VAC - nominal) takes, are two different things.
Lightning can jump several miles through air with no other apparent conductor, household voltage can do 1/2" tops. If lightning can go through
even 1000 feet of air, why can't it go through a few layers of 3/4" plywood and 1/2" sheetrock and, conversly, through you, like a microwave
through a cheap burrito in a convienence store? Therefore, attracting lightning is a worse idea than repelling it. Hence, lightning rods.
Now the only thing the above did not take in to account is skin affect.
Lighting can and has done some really strange things.
Poor or no ground is one reason for a strike and on the other hand why people have survived being hit.
The rest is spot on and to think it was Ben Franklin who first work it out
So a direct strike can be the result of poor or no grounding.
And we ground to prevent a strike not survive one.
A lot of lighting damage is do to induced voltage from a close by strike.
And a good ground system is all ways a good idea for a number of reasons .
Terry in the rush to be help full you just got a little a head of your self. And left a few things out.
No big thing. We have all done it one time or another.
Old F