RBM wrote:

You can buy a simple plug in outlet tester from Home Depot. It's a three
prong device which will tell you if the outlet is wired correctly or how
it's wired wrong. If the polarity is reversed in the outlet and this man's
equipment has the neutral and ground wiring connected together inside his
device, it would cause a dead short and trip the breaker when it was plugged
in


I'll second the miswired outlet answer.

The OP didn't mention whether the satellite equipment used a two or
three wire plug on its power cord. I'd bet it was a three wire plug and
some previous bozo managed to get the hot connected to the ground
terminal on that weird receptical.

Nor did the OP say whether some other appliance plugged into that weird
outlet worked ok or not. A two wire plug device like a table lamp
wouldn't be bothered by a hot ground terminal.

What you said is correct, but having the neutral lead tied to ground
inside equipment like that is a no-no. On equipment with two blade plugs
designers will often have a very high resistance (like 100K ohms) or so
connected between neutral and the equipment's chassis to discharge
static buildup, this was commonly done with TVs using CRTs which can
have 20,000 volt dc anode supplies in them.

I've even seen two bladed wall wart power supplies where you can measure
about 100K ohms between the plug blades and the low voltage side.

Jeff
--
Jeffry Wisnia

(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)

"Truth exists; only falsehood has to be invented."