Originally Posted by oldsteve

I was a "bad boy" back in the '70s. I was an avionics tech in the Navy at the time. We would fire up the HF radio in a helicopter, dial in a CB frequency, listen for awhile, and when one of the CBers got to talking all cocky about how powerful his rig was, we'd hit the transmit (TX) key and blank him out.

I don't recall the exact wattage of the HF radio, but other techs claimed that you could walk by the antenna with a fluorescent light tube and have it light up when the transmitter was keyed.

But that may be urban legend. I don't know for sure. I do know that if you were working on it at a bench and put your fingertip over the end of the coaxial connector at the final output, you'd get a nasty RF burn.