The author is a broadcast sales engineer for RF Specialties Group.
OK, so another column on safety, but not the usual technical electron stuff.
Every engineer knows you should be able to tell the state of an electronic device by looking at its LEDs and their color. Yet I have devices where all the LEDs are red, even the “power on.”
This was common on some older transmitters, switching panels, phasors and remote controls. Not real helpful. Badly labeled or unlabeled color indicators can cause confusion and possibly mask an unsafe condition.
Sure, you can swap in a basic faint red, green or yellow LED to improve the situation. But why not install a bright, custom-colored LED instead — to help you better distinguish the status, detect the presence of a problem or help a manager who is trying to describe a problem to you over the phone from hundreds of miles away?
My artsy wife told me about alcohol inks, which she obtained at one of those big-brand arts stores and which you can find online from crafting sources. There are dozens of colors available to help you create unmistakable LEDs.
I thought alcohol ink might be one of those flavored drink drops for water. They are not. Alcohol ink tastes awful and colors your tongue for days. It is also toxic and very flammable. But it is useful.
I did try using colored laundry pens and transparent nail polish on clear or white LEDs. They tended to fade after a while, likely because an LED seems to emit a small amount of fading UV light. Why not give alcohol ink a try?
Want it less bright and more vivid? Just put more drops on and let it dry between drops. If you hold the LED while it’s drying so the bulb is pointed downwards, more colored ink will accumulate on the front of the LED.
Even alcohol ink tends to fade a bit after a few years, but no problem — a quick drop of color on the LED tip will restore the coloring.
A flashing LED with a custom color will give the most information you can possibly get out of an LED panel.
Rx safety
With alcohol ink you can color just about anything, such as cables meters or fuses — you might even stain some glass for your church. One little bottle will go a long way.
A particularly helpful use is for drug safety. Everybody’s taking drugs at our age, right? Diabetes, heart or the, ahem, little blue pills the wife keeps. 
I have several bottles of the same size and color on my dresser. I take some pills rarely but others daily. I once took a couple of wrong medications because I’d picked up the wrong little white pill and had a problem that led to an ambulance trip to the ER.
Yet, at 3 a.m., I can barely bring the itty bitty prescription printing or pill imprint into focus. I found that I can put drops of alcohol ink and a big letter or two on the top of each bottle to make sure I grab the right one. Every top is unique.
This is also helpful when I’m trying to fish the right medicine bottle out of the bottom of a transmitter tool bag.
You know the UV flashlight you use to look inside a transmitter for splatters, drips or other issues not normally visible? That light also is useful for finding little white pills that have spilled into the bottom of your tool bag or onto the floor at home. (Most pill coatings will change color or glow under UV light. Go check for yourself. If you break a pill in half, the inside often will be yet another color, helping you match it to the pills in the pharmacy bottle.)
You can kill yourself almost as fast with the wrong pill as by discharging an HV cap with your fingers and wet shoes. Hopefully this tip will help you be safe and not just with electrons.
There’s not a lot of room for a safety mistake once you lock the gate and start along a wooded forest road that runs several miles up to the transmitter site. (I used to work on an ambulance and 911 would not help us down a forest or gated road — ambulances usually have street tires, not 4WD. Often we had to ask the caller to come open the entry gate or crawl/drive to the gate where we could work on the patient.)
Take the right pills, double discharge all the transmitter caps, use your voltage sensor and sponge shoes and get to a main road so an ambulance can get to you and your problem if you need one. Don’t volunteer to thin the engineering herd. It is already getting too small.
Be safe!
