Am I the only one who thought hi-pot testing was overkill until a 737 in Tulsa proved me wrong?
I used to skip the hi-pot on most of my coax runs because I figured a visual check and a multimeter would catch anything bad. Last year I had a bird strike repair come through our shop at KTUL and the VSWR was acting up on a transponder line that looked perfectly fine. My lead finally made me hook up the tester and we found a pinhole in the insulation that no eyeball was ever gonna spot. Now I want to know how many of you actually run the full test every time, or am I still the odd one out here?
Man, I gotta push back on one thing here. A hi-pot test is not the same as a VSWR check, and it won't find a pinhole in the insulation either. What a hi-pot does is stress the cable with high voltage to see if the insulation breaks down, so it catches weak spots, cracks, or damage that a meter can't. The VSWR reading is what tipped you off to the problem in the first place, and a TDR or a megger would've been the tool to actually locate that pinhole. So yeah, testing every time is smart, but know which test is doing which job or you'll trust the wrong result.