Lightning jolt

It was a typical summer afternoon in the year 1977.

I was working CW on 40m using my homebrew EL84 rig. The antenna was a straight dipole using telephone drop wire as the feeder.

Meanwhile the sky became overcast and there was a continuous rumble as I continued to work.

All of a sudden I received a jolt through my Junker key followed by the crash of a thunderbolt.

Without a thought I yanked the feeder off its sockets and threw it on the floor. My heart missed a beat when I saw the arc that followed between the banana plugs and the cement concrete floor.

The following morning's local newspaper headline was 'Lightning stuns football players'. It was a direct hit at the nearby football field. Fortunately only a couple of the players had fainted and there were no casualties.
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Drake TR-4C - receive problem

The old workhorse seldom gave problems on transmit.

A frequent receive problem was the receiver going dead on switching back to receive from transmit.

The problem was solved by replacing custom C145 (4 electrolytic capacitors housed in a can) with individual capacitors.

Capacitors drying out was the root cause.
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