had a neighborhood buddy who made a half-million volt Tesla coil, and blew up two banks of foil/glass capacitors before sanding the edges and dunking them in mineral oil.  almost as bad a mess as his hydrogen plant.

I think that would be megalossy at RF... there are spikes up there, but not as many as I expected with a spark gap generating the magnetic field changes.  didn't mess up the AM band too badly.  on that basis, I think it's a low-dissipation dummy load you're building.

assume you have already tried the Google/Bing/Opera route with these, right?

if NTE can't match 'em, and a web search finds nothing, bin 'em.

or hook them up to some HV and see what color of magic smoke was inside.  that might be a clue.

Arctic Freeze is conductive, including the squeeze-out.  seriously conductive.

I'd consider cannibalizing one the transistors you intend to use to find out where the pellet is inside the case, and just put a dab of AF heatsink right where the pellet goes.  the truly anal builder, seeing this, might decide to lap-polish the heat sinks and transistor cases to insure totally flat surfaces and the best heat transfer possible.

but seriously, be careful where you put that stuff, it's flashover city.

who cares about zillion megaton bombs?  we all know how things work today.

the smart, cheap, clever adversary will put a few little bombs in the upper atmosphere and use the EMP to fry the communications networks and all our little microchipped toys.  we're all fat, lazy Americans with bum thumbs from fiddling phones and too-small eToys, right?

burn out all the RF/IF coils in your tube rigs, too.

do get a block of unobtanium, to roll those hard to find parts from, and some lengths of stock hole, so you can set a piece against a chassis and not have drilling dust.  only hold it by the center, though, that stuff is wily don't set it on edge.

seriously, in the old days when Radio Shack had parts, I hit the multi-value packages hard.  nowadays, I have had to do that again, only through fleebay's "US shipper quality HK supplier" type entries.  I have restocked a sparse RF section of the parts bins with some feedthroughs from former Soviet republics and some kits from Dan's Small Parts.

whenever I need a cap or a resistor not on hand, I order 5 or 10 invariably from Mouser or Digi-Key.

Newark is the place for those obsolete 50s and 60s connectors.  you just have to figure out who bought the tooling from the original company.  you'd be surprised what's still in stock.

22K dropping resistors are the most common culprit in Heathkit HF transcievers to rise and blow the bias/gain in tube stages... but I've found a bunch of other values in the audio/oscillator area, the sideband crystal oscillator area, and the driver area that go wacko.  measure 'em all is my advice if you're having issues, and if they are off in-circuit, unsolder one end and check 'em without hindrances.  anything off value, install the next higher wattage, usually 1 watt.

5UP only spits Benton Harbor Green because he had a garage full of unbuilts he dumped last week... .

the 70s were a great time to spend money at the Shack.  now, the only thing I need them for is mike stands.

it's going to be like hooking up two GFIs in a row... they fight with each other, and if one isn't fired off, the other will be.  nothing will work.

antenna tuners are adjustable tanks that are designed assuming there is a fixed load on one end, and they fudge it into matching on the other end.  you may or may not put any more amps into the antenna, but the objective is to present as close to a design load (50 ohms usually) to the power stage of the transmitter as possible.

the in and out of the tank circuit are interdependent... there is no hard isolation, and pulling effects will slightly change the resonance of one side as the other side is tickled closer to optimum.  that's why you tune in several stages of adjustment for minimum smoke.

your modern internal tuners are automatic and power output is often limited by the tuning software routine until the load gets within the "safe band" of lowered reverse power (max forward power, ratio of which is SWR.)

so now, we add another tuner, automatic or manual, outside the radio because we can.  as one hunts, it detunes the other.  as the other tries to catch up, it hoses up the work of the first.  ring around the rosy until the transmitter shuts down.

so don't do that.  one tuner at a time.

there has always been an issue even cross-town with police talking to the sheriff, or fire department... they don't have the radios for the other frequencies.  allegedly the digital upgrades some departments are paying for allow this, but you have to get the correct frequency allocations.

in short, the 911 case got attention because the others are seen as "local" issues.

if certain folks were even moderately clever, they would have frequency agile radios with, say, two or three talk buttons assignable for locally appropriate frequencies.  said freqs to be assigned regionally in blocks, not randomly spit out of the file cabinet because this one is next freq up.  or use cellular technology with a Selcall or subaudible tone underneath it, so you hit red and talk if you need the sheriff's office, then green and start talking if you want to talk to local police, and so on.

but there is a silo mentality in Washington, not a coordination mentality.

the FCC has sweeping powers since 1934 to shut down, redirect, reallocate, and otherwise mung up your radio life already.  this is redundant legislation.

when Son #3 owned a bowling pro shop, he had the occasional customer who wouldn't be happy if you hung 'em with a NEW rope.  finally the son called another mentor ball driller and asked what to do.  "punch 'em an attitude hole" was the answer.  in other words, just fill and drill the hole where the guy wants it, give him a handshake, and tell him, "I hope this works for you, if you have any other issues call (whutchie) at (wheresis)."

this EO is an "attitude hole" to settle the rants of some other a-- hole.  enough said.

any ham club buddies who would bring their rigs over and test in your shack should earn a handshake and supper in my opinion.  you might get lucky and have good insulators on that high tension line, or you might be really in the soup and be surrounded with plasma TV sets, the worst noisemakers short of a side-scatter military radar next door.

the detectors confirm it... hamming is a gas.

soil conductivity is a bigger issue than soil type.  clay holds a lot of water,  rock is hard to poke ground rods into.

from my travels as an old broadcast brat, I can tell you the happiest "dollar a hollar" radio station owners had their tower in a swamp.  feedline maintenance was less fun, and there's a station in lakes country MN that is in the middle of an active pasture, and the "whack whack whack whack" of the electric fence around the tower is prominent in their on-air signal.  but the groundplane was outstanding -- so much so, the stations couldn't increase power to their theoretical allotment if they wanted to, once the effect of the groundplane were taken into effect.

but that ground wave was consistent, so they spent less in power to cover their area and collect ad money.

try working mobile/portable with a low-watter and slingshot temporary antennas on anything you're really looking hard at.

those who are fed up with cat pictures.... know this...HAL is watching you.

Google set up a neural network of 16,000 computers, and turned it loose on Da Webs without adult supervision to see what happened.

darn thing went looking for cat pictures.

you have been warned