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Re: Pacmakers and Tesla coils = bad??




-----Original Message-----
From: Tesla List <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
Date: Monday, February 14, 2000 4:24 PM
Subject: RE: Pacmakers and Tesla coils = bad??


>Original Poster: "Viggy" <LittleViggy-at-alum.manhattan.edu>
>
>It was my impression that EM fields, like gravitational fields; dropped
>off inversely proportional to the distance squared?  I.e. the field at a
>distance 'd' away is equal to the field at "zero" distance, times
>1/(d^2)
>
>Viggy

Only for a "point source", and in the "far field" for time varying fields.
For static fields, it goes as 1/r for an infinite line source, and doesn't
vary at all for an infinite plane.   For time varying fields, it is a bit
more complex, because it takes time for the field from a given charged point
to "travel" to the measurement point.  The "far field" can be loosely be
defined as far enough so that the source can be considered as a point
source.  In practice, in antenna work, we consider distances that are
several wavelengths away from an antenna that is a fraction of a wavelength
in size to be reasonably far field.

For tesla coils, in general, the frequency is several hundred kHz, and a
wavelength is on the order of 1000 meters, so you're not going to be getting
several wavelengths away.  However, the source is also very small (on the
order of 1/1000 wavelength) so for distances on the order of several times
the size of the source, you probably can consider it a point source.