FlyingGreg,
You are right that a better system of activating your radio is to plug and unplug the battery. Outside of crash damage, probably the single largest cause of radio failure is bad switches. However, Murphy’s Law is always in effect and what can go wrong will. The situation that I described in my earlier post was a bad connection in the battery connector. I was turning the radio on and off by plugging and unplugging the battery to an extension cable connected to the receiver. It may be true that sometimes I am the worlds biggest dumb*****, but I crashed the same airplane 3 times in a row with radio failures. The radio would work fine on the ground both with the engine running and not. I shook, pushed, pulled and wiggled every wire in the system and had other club members check it and as soon as I launched the radio died. After the 3rd time, I threw the transmitter as hard and far as I could. Broke the antenna, busted the case and knocked out the rudder/throttle gimbals. I had 4 receivers on that channel and I bought crystals and moved them to another transmitter. I checked the battery and noted that it was delivering only 75% of its rated capacity. When I was clipping off the battery leads to make up another battery pack, I found the poor connection. When I would plug the connectors together the ground pin would not fully mate with its corresponding pin in the female connector. The locking tab on the pin was loose and allowed the pin to slide back in the connector barely making contact. As soon as I launched I guess that the force of the slipstream caused the connection to open.

I was able to reinstall the gimbals in the transmitter and glue up the case and removed the crystal, battery, and antenna and now the club has another buddy box.

I had previously enjoyed the reputation of being a pretty good flyer and it was getting so that every time I started to launch everybody started to hide under the tables and under their trucks. Bummer!