After the demise of the old Amateur Scientist column I let my
subscription to The Scientific American lapse and have seen no reason
to renew it, since...

Now, back OT... After getting home last night I was working on a
recalcitrant SG-500 amplifier that wanted to hang up in transmit when
keyed by the PTT, but would not hang up when auto sensing of RF drive
was used for keying... My son opened it up and we removed some logic
chips and using the erasor on a #2 yellow pencil, polished the pins...
Whilst he was finishing that I reconfigured the antenna switch box,
checked the SWR on the 160 meter array and then proceeded to help him
with the amp repair by pointing out that he now did not have a "power
on" light on the amp... While he was opening the amp up again
patience I'll get to the point in a moment I spun across the bottom of
160 and listened to a weak CW qso going on.. There was very low static
and it promised to be a good evening if we could get some QRO back on
line...
By now he had found the loose connector inside the amp and reseated
it... We put the amp back on its shelf and connected up... When he
pushed the final coax connector on, the meter on the transceiver went
nuts banging from pin to pin and the receiver was making deafening
popping noises...
"Hey dad, you broke the Orion.", he challenged - he was a bit miffed
over having missed replacing the connector on the amp...
"Mai non, my slow son.", I corrected...
I immediately shut off the power to the Orion and asked him if he had
reversed the power leads to the amp... He indignantly insisted he had
not... He fetched a VOM (which is what I wanted but was too lazy to
get for myself) and proved the polarity was correct... I took the VOM,
unscrewed the antenna coax and put the leads across the PL259...
There was 340,000 microvolts on the connector... His eyebrows went
way up...
"What the hey?", he said...
"It's blowing rain out there.", I said...
"No it's not... It's dead calm out there."
"Go look."
When he pulled open the side door to the shop he was greeted with a
face full of wind and ice cold rain...
OK, now to the point:
There was roughly 3 minutes from the time I was listening to the weak
cw qso to when we unscrewed the coax, and rehooked up to the amp... In
that ~3 minutes it went from essentially no static (well OK, S1-2
static on the meter, which on 160 meters is NO static at all) to just
this side of blowing out the front end of the receiver... There was no
rising static level to herald the approach of a front... It simply was
low static until the moment the first gust of wind swept across our
fields bringing the rain, and huge precip charges on the 130 foot high
antennas...

denny / k8do