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Re: Discharge impedance of a CW Tesla coil



Hi Terry,

This is very interesting stuff.

Did you build the RF power generator,  or are you using a linear amp or
something from work ?  Is its output sinusoidal or is it a square wave ?
I take it that you are driving the resonator via a primary coil rather
than feeding the base ?

Sorry for all the questions,  but solid state coiling has always been an
interest for me.  I am a power electronics engineer by profession and see
the potential of using a power inverter for a small solid state TC.

Did you try modulating the RF feed ?  I found that the discharge becomes
more like a dissruptive TC if the RF is modulated with a narrow pulse
waveform.  More bolts and less of a brush effect.  The buzzing and ozone
return of course,  but the average power drawn can be slashed greatly.

There is a paper by Dr. Gary L Johnson called "Input Impedance of a Tesla
Coil" which covers a similar series of tests to what you describe.  I
trust you have already seen this,  but could scan it for you if you
haven't.  It would be interesting to see if your findings agree with his.
He used a half bridfe MOSFET inverter to end feed the resonator.

Please keep us informed of developments,
							Cheers,

							-Richie,

> Original Poster: Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> 	I have been playing with my patched together RF generator and measurement
> equipment.  Today I took off work early to do something important. ;-))  I
> was able to measure the impedance of the brush discharge of my coil run
> from the generator in CW (continuous wave) mode.
>

> snip <