Originally Posted by
Lazerdog
I worked on HF comms for various aircraft and...
Lazer, I was a radio maintenance airdog for the C5 and C141 many years ago.
On the C5, I can remember seeing bad grounding at the antenna connector for that big, bad Avco HF R/T hung on a piss-poor rack in the tail.
You could see it - a coronal arc around the base of the PL-259 style connector. It would glow in the dark when your buddy hit the TX line in the avionics bay. You could draw it out farther and create an arc by placing the blade of a screwdriver against the R/T mount and edging it up to the faulted connector - but if you slipped a bit and lost the ground connection to the mount, you'd end up with burn on your hand.
Cheers!
Ray