Aha! This explains why they all read this way! Now to isolate the real culprit- the source of the bite when I (unintentionally) ground myself to the setup. Hopefully one of the old units might have a shorted cap so it will be simple to find & deal with- any old unit found guilty will find itself summarily placed on the recycle pallet. I knew someone would point me in the right direction. THANK YOU!
Now to find a better way to isolate the problem than to volunteer to be a human ground connection.... And I sure hope I don't have to crawl through all the spaghetti trying to find poor connections on all that coax. I have a bad feeling that something is not quite right somewhere besides this mild shock issue, since the signal is ratty out in the distribution path. I am hoping it might just be an aging video amp trying to give up. Old systems can get to be such a pain. So far the symptoms are not quite the classic ground loop bars and hum.
One step at a time, at least I'll now be looking for real rather than imaginary gremlins. Thanks again!
