The antenna I use for my amateur radio station is a Cushcraft R7 half wave vertical. This antenna has been installed for at least 15 years. It was on my house in Ohio for 3 years and on my present house here in Texas for 12.
The lighting strike at this QTH (location ) killed my radio transceiver. I now have a new Ten-Tec Omni VII that I didn’t want to damage by using a bad feed-line or antenna.
I removed the matching network from the antenna expecting what I thought should be a total burnout. But as you can see except for some resident spiders, it is in remarkable good shape. What you see is two torrid core transformers and the fine wire red colored coil which is an RF choke. There are a few coupling capacitors there too. I was certain the fine wire choke would be fried.
Some emory paper, a shot or two of WD40 (yep) and good old elbow grease got everything cleaned up as you see here.
The coax checked out fine too. I cleaned the outdoor PL259 and the Ohm reading went from about 1.5 Meg open resistance to immeasurably high. So there was some contamination of the connection. That’s gone now.
I fired up the rig on 14.220 MHz called CQ a few times and VE4QZ, Doug in Strathclair Mantobia Canada called me back. So we are alive and well again!