2E26s weren't a bad tube, but they ran quite hot in that envelope, and if you hit a pretty good bump, as driver in things like Motorola business band sets locked in the trunk, they would short.  yes, short life.  I always though the interns designed that one while the paid tube engineers were doing the 6146 family.

however, if the arc happens to take out something important, like for instance the grid, or blows up the biasing, or perhaps blows through and takes out the driving system, then there is no recovery without a healthy credit card as backup.

which is why all the leading engineers caution that safety shutdown circuits are a must in a RF power amp, and you see them in commercial and broadcast equipment but rarely in the amateur market.  the present implementations easily double the cost of the amp.  back in the thyratron and plate relay days, not so much, but lots of false triggers.

Loctite thread locker is glyptal.  blue for light hold, red for tight hold, green for never freakin' comes apart again.  for something like a key, I'd use nail polish, just a dab, after holding the brush for about a minute, so it doesn't seep in but holds on the surface.  need to readjust, chip it off with a knife.  otherwise, you have to fiddle around with acetone on a rag or Q-tip for a while to soften it.

long as you can remember to put the iron down when you smell burning meat, keep on haywiring!

pending congrats on the new pending job!

consider halfway steps... what can you absolutely, positively NOT afford to lose?  what can you hack around to stay operational in a disaster, no matter how ugly it is to fix later?

take a common example, we'll call it St. Oopsie, 400-500 bed hospital building on a busy thoroughfare that gets flood scares but really only has experienced a couple flooded elevator pits historically.  there is a parking ramp across the street.  there is almost always a cage for maintenance stuff inside these tied-building ramps... couple tanks of gas, lawn mowers, one or two four-wheelers, assorted personal cruft that is not supposed to be in there but nobody growls because it's behind the uniform lockers.

let's be generous and say the HVAC plant is above ground someplace close, has the main power switchgear in there as well as boilers and pumps.

how does the power get to the upper floors? -- distribution frames, generally, copper buss separated with high-temp insulation, in protective covers.  some of it may come in large conduits.  there may or may not be safe switchgear, the master distribution for the hospital building itself may be in the basement, as will be air handlers that provide the pressure behind the heating/cooling coils for rooms and common areas.

you flood it, you lose the air handlers.  you can fake it with fans for a period.

you lose the basement, you lose the building master power.  but you can knock a hole or crack a window and put aerial cable into a floor, take apart the panelbus, and bolt the wires onto the lugs.

you lose water pressure, you can hack it for a while with a tanker truck and a fire pump, or with 5-gallon water jugs and a bunch of staffers' kids using hand trucks.

you can run on oxygen tanks, and most hospitals have backup tank service on 2500 psi manifolds backing up the big liquid tank system.

you are Stuck Outta Luck without electricity, even for evacuation.

nobody is going to put a drone into your lobby if you have the generators on the ramp instead of in the basement, and run a pair of 3 or 4 way drop lines into the building for a couple days, until everybody is out of there.

IMPHO, as long as pharmacy and power is above water, and you can put heat into the pipes in winter, you should be able to keep folks alive until you can evacuate them.  you live to collect your facility insurance and business-interruption insurance and fix the place.  and since it's all new stuff on another guy's dime, do it above water this time.

you COULD even install a parallel emergency set of lines ready to reterminate if you think ahead for relative chump change, a million or so.  this you can build into your next required upgrade with two or three former well-heeled patients' help.

heh, the insurance companies don't care if nobody provides services, as long as they have their annual contract check in hand from the corporations insuring workers.  this is one pre-existing condition that Obamacare doesn't cover

answer?  uh, hmmm, ahhhh... testing 1 2 3... ah! -- St. Oopsie sends the CFO out twice a week for lottery tickets?

Martin, sounds like they either start a fundraising program or close up, based on the uprating of the standards.  and both are occurring as the standards of care and diagnostic costs are rising.  no insurance company pays for facilities costs now.

the basic method of upgrading at this point is fundraisers.  big parties for big money are becoming a necessary evil.  born and raised in Fargo, and the primary hospital/clinic system there was just taken over by a Sioux Falls operation, which is expanding rapidly on the benevolence of a regional multi-millionnaire.  they just had their first white-tie private event up there, and it raised a lot of eyebrows, something like that never happened when it was St. Luke's.  your best HSM suit was fine.

my preferred hospital/clinic complex here in the Twin Cities, downtown, has a very very active social net of the hoi polloi, which has resulted in five major facility additions in 10 years.  to get a "leaf" with your name on it in the lobby starts at 5 grand, and many are considerably over 100 grand.  these are the supporting players who don't get a wing named after them.

used to be different.  before the MRIs and dual-isotope cardiac stress tests that have saved my bacon several times, for instance.  I'd have been dust in the wind at 43 back in the simpler times.

ps -- around the house, I am referred to as the "safety nazi."  when I first read code books, it was when working part-time at a hospital to pay for the second college education, after all my TV hair fell out and the first career went fallow.  I see stuff around my projects from the "life safety" regulations.  so shoot me.

I presume WA4D doesn't have circuit breakers or fuses because they're a hokey government mandate, and his wires work just fine.  or sewer pipes, because they need inspection and occasionally gunk up.

fact is, stuff outside your control happens, like posts on these here interwebbie pipe things.  you can whine, panic, prepare some alternatives if it looks like a rough period is coming soon, or try to hide.  this thread is about options for #3.  you don't have to participate if you don't like it.

have fun on the air

~BIN:  thorium is indeed fissionable, it was considered for power plants and bomb work in the 30s and 40s.  as an actinide-series element, it will probably drill for the bones and other calcium structures in the body if it gets loose.

looks like dirty-bomb fodder out of controlled hands.

I don't think you'll find the portable power "piles" at your local surplus center any time soon.  when you consider all the costs and liabilities of stacking the things up in warehouses for emergency service, the level of guard needed both in storage and in deployment, and the necessity for nuclear-trained management of the system... the trailer-mount portable diesel generator is going to win out by a factor of zillions to one.

certainly they're not going to put 8 or 10 of them four miles from my house on a snow-swept National Guard field with two strands of barbed wire atop a Cyclone fence keeping them away from wacko bin loonies.

both.

turn on: power supply, then rig

turn off:  rig, then power supply.

this way, any transients or hiccups in the regulator are NOT going to raise hob in the radio.

the NDSU ham club W0SHR owned a unit.  some of the folks were a little rough on the 7 or 8 tapes that were left back in 1970.

with the Internet, they are an interesting antique.

there are MOV or gas tube lightning suppressors for all sort, manner, and kind of RJ jacks, cable-type jacks, and USB jacks.  get an outlet strip that has 'em all and run everything to the radio through there.

there are other lovely things you can use if you hack open cables, like TranZorbs, but basically you have two issues here.

(1) keep bad voltage outside: lightning protection and nice thick fat grounds.

(2) induced foreign voltages inside:  use suppressors.  they need to tie to common-mode electrical ground at the electrical system.

I've also invested in ethernet ground blocks as well as phone ground blocks for the lines I run from the house into the shack.  so far, so good.  they connect using a Colorado block to whole house electrical ground at the #6 wire on the house side, and bonded shack electrical ground out there.  so far, nothing has come inside.

I disconnect my antennas when I'm not actually wasting electrons, and I'm letting an old BlitzBug and the suppression in my balun take care of the rest.

use a large toroid and wrap around it as many turns as you can spare in the cable length, or do the same with a clamp-on.  coils wind the same direction all the way through to be effective.  you get all sorts of capacitive coupling and field cancellations if you double the wire over.  plus, those insulation coverings in USB cables are thinner than a tax man's smile, and you're begging for a short.  nice gentle wraps, all the same way, and use a cable tie lightly where the cable enters and exits so it doesn't unwind on you.

theoretically, the conductive rod should be fine if air-insulated.

unless you have a nasty wall that is always full of moisture.  then just about any heatshrink should work.  if you're running high power or have a large voltage mismatch going into your tuner, then several layers should be used.  based on the breakdown of what heatshrink you have handy, insulate for 6kv or 7 kv if you are running the limit.

you are insulated excellently from surface by the ceramic insulators.  there will be 1/2 to 3/4 inch airgap to any surface if you drilled your holes straight, and that's easily several kv unless you have the walls festering inside with moisture and rot.