~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.

number one... put the suits in the basement, and put the generators a couple floors above ground.  put the fuel tanks a floor above that.  if you can't do it in the hospital, dump a floor of parking, and put the generators one floor below top of the parking ramp.

number two... there needs to be at least one elevator that runs on emergency power, no matter what The Book says.

number three... main power distribution should not be below ground at all.

number four... the power transfer switches to emergency buss need to be the good ol' type with a huge manual lever for the task.

when I worked through the second college degree as a maintenance assistant in a hospital in North Dakota, we had half of it... #1 and #4.

now that we've had Katrina and Sandy, it's time for the accreditation folks to dust off their mimeographed sheets fading with age, and upgrade the requirements with, say, a 10-year maximum window to upgrade facilities.

any way you can get some height on that skyhook, even just for testing, and see if you have a signal out?  I'm wondering if it's all being close-coupled and frittered away lying right on the roof.

there's an old temp antenna trick of putting a couple tripods on the roof to hold up the antenna, and drop a sandbag on the cross-bracing of each one so it stays put long enough to work something.  use a couple of Ideal radiator-type clamps to hold long dowels or a piece of PVC pipe to each one, raise the antenna, and recheck conditions.  that should get you 10 feet, and get just barely out of the ground effect to see if your equipment is worth messing with.

if you're talking about the lacquer pens, they are imported from a japanese manufacturer, and the indentical pens are also availiable.  I got a couple at an art store, and they work the same.

over time, that metallic lacquer will dull, also.  it has on ice cube supplies for me, mostly.  nothing is perfect, but I'm using more and more Brother TZ labels folded against themselves sticky to sticky.

what else needs to be grounded?  anything that connects directly or indirectly to the RF signal path.  lightning stops, feedthrough panel for antennas, rig, power supply, tuner, any other toys that might be on that side of the chassis of any of the above.  mast or tower.  remote antenna switch.  everything.

most of it will have a big stud and a wingnut in back for that ground connection.  if not, ground to a chassis screw that has continuity to another chassis screw.

it would appear ideal from my reading to have a common ground buss in the shack that directly feeds through to a solid ground system outside the shack.  take your details from researched and/or engineered sources that are solid, like the Handbook and the polyphaser site, instead of the rest of us who haven't spent the time and money they have.

is that IHF watts?

and do you have to pay per diem and gas for the FCC guys who will follow the truck carrying this thing all the way to your house?

inquiring minds want to know....

5UP is more than 2 bubbles short, he's avoiding this thread completely.  BH green with envy??

Not all merch on Amazon is under their control, there are a lot of individual marketers that use Amazon as their front door.  like eBay but a little better control IMPHO.  I have not had a claim, or noticed any major discreptancy between ordering from an Amazon corporation warehouse and an affiliate.

I suspect they do a better job of policing the fringe elements off their site than, ahhh, others.

out here in snowville, the larger filling stations have their big-axe generators out back fueled and ready to rumble all the time.  every couple years it comes in handy.  while I'm sure a few operators like Ashland/Superamerica and Holiday thought of it in the 30-inch Halloween blizzards, Y2K made it a point of advertising, thus, good stuff.

doubt a 6-pumper in midtown would have space for one, but the block-long palaces would.  but it will probably take two years to get each one permitted because of the tough fire regulations.

meanwhile, this weekend, there are 5 points with a line of 5000 gallon military tankers in Noo Yawk City (git in line) where anybody can get 10 gallons of spill, no questions, no cash, keep it moving, thanks to Presidential orders to the Department of Defense.

I'm 1400 miles away, and I approve cutting the red tape and getting something done.

printf "Hello World" is going to be problematic for lots of programmers, frankly.  the libraries are wrong.  or the interface is dev/null.  or it's not the person's home language.  or you have a virus on the PC that has interrupted 32 services, 6 of which are in the display chain.

you take what you get, work around what you can, and report service-affecting bugs with the right priority, and any good outfit that wants to be around for the 1st anniversary will fix things and upgrade the code as they can.

not that I'd know anything about working around the clock to figure out why things don't work....