On Friday, January 8, 2016 at 12:32:06 PM UTC-5, Ralph Mowery wrote:

...snip...

At the last house I lived in had a ham radio tower that was about 50 feet to
the top antenna and this house has one that is about 70 feet to the top.
Been lucky so far on that as I have not lost any radio equipment either.

When I was in the Coast Guard in Alaska, lighting hit the 1/4 mile high
LORAN tower. Since I was transmitter tech at the time, and spent most of
my days working in the transmitter building which was at the base of the
tower, I had the pleasure of repairing the damage to the transmitter that
was on-air at the time as well as the dummy load that the standby transmitter
was connected to.

The dummy load and final transformer assembly were housed in the same
cabinet for ease of switching between the 2 transmitters. When the
lightening blew up - and I mean BLEW UP - the final transformer assembly,
the shrapnel took out the dummy load resistor bank. What didn't get
pulverized melted in the resulting fire.

The worst thing that a LORAN transmitter technician can experience
is silence in the transmitter building. All stations have 2 transmitters,
which are swapped every 2 weeks - on-air/standby, back and forth. When
performing preventive maintenance on the standby transmitter, it is always
supposed to be available within one hour. (One *minute* of off-air time ruins
a "perfect month". "Perfect months", especially consecutive perfect months,
were the goal of any LORAN station. We received a ribbon for 7 consecutive
perfect months when I was stationed in Germany.)

Anyway, silence in the transmitter building means that your on-air transmitter
is down and that the standby isn't ready. It's a eerie, uncomfortable feeling.
We were silent for 4 days while we repaired the equipment. Our radio
transmissions didn't have the comforting tick-tick-tick of the LORAN signal
in the background, the scopes in the monitor room weren't glowing with
the signal's familiar envelope, etc. The only good part (OK, it's weird) is
that I had the opportunity to walk up to the tower and touch it. That is
not something that you can do when it's pumping out a mega-watt of signal.

We used to stand near the tower with 4' florescent tubes and have them
light up in our hands. You could hold one end of the tube with one hand
and slide the light up and down the tube with the other.