[TCML] How close is close enough? (Primary capacitance)

[Brandon Hendershot]

Hi Brandon,

As far as whether to go higher or lower than the recommended  
capacitance, If irc, you want to go higher than the desired  
capacitance because it's easier to take away some of the capacitance  
than adding some. I don't know exactly how you would fine tune the  
capacitance, but I assume it involves soldering on an extra smaller  
cap to decrease the capacitance a bit. Opposed to desoldering and  
removing a cap from your MMC. Hope that helps.

Brandon, AZ

On Mar 23, 2010, at 8:33 AM, Brandon Garretson  
<garretsontech at gmail.com> wrote:

> Greetings TCML,
> My question today is regarding primary capacitance and how much
> headroom we have to play with while still achieving close to maximum
> performance.
> Between being a bit of a noob and more than mildly math-tarded, I tend
> to rely on programs to do the math for me as well as searching this
> incredible forum for posts from people who have encountered similar
> problems. But what I have not been able to deduce thus far is this;
> How close is “close enough”?
> I feel that Telsamap and JavaTC are very helpful applications
> (although they don’t always seem to agree which makes things even mo 
> re
> confusing). They give you very specific data as to what the primary
> capacitance should be in any given tank circuit, not a narrow range,
> but a seamingly dead-on set in stone number.
> In an ideal world, we could nail that number every time. But since we
> (I) live in a much less than ideal world (the real one), some of us
> (myself) are required to work with what we have.
> The core of my question is this, how many nf away from the ideal
> capacitance can one go before he can no longer compensate through
> tuning and still achieve good, if not excellent, performance?
> Im sure the amount of leeway would be different depending on the size
> and design of the apparatus so let us say we are talking about fairly
> conventional, medium sized, NST powered RSG devices.
> To give a specific example, lets say the design on paper demands 17nf
> but your cap is 20, same design with a different transformer, it wants
> 35nf and the cap you have is only 33.
> Are a few nf in either direction going to noticeably impede  
> performance?
> If one had to choose a less than perfect capacitance is it better to
> go bigger or smaller?
> Is there a certain percentage, in general, of the ideal capacitance
> from which one can deviate were any slight decrease in performance
> would go unnoticed? Say +/- 10%, or would it be closer to +/- 1%?
>
> Thanks!
> Brandon, NJ
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