[TCML] grounding, neighboring electronics

[jimlux <jimlux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It being that time of year for public TC displays, the question comes up 
of "grounding" your TC.
First off - there's no need to *ground*, as in connect to earth, a TC. 
You can run a TC in orbit, or hanging from the roof of a building, or...
What you need is a path for the RF currents to flow back to the base of 
the secondary.
Now, one (poor) way to do this is to drive a stake in the ground, run 
100 ft of wire to it, and use "earth" as the return path.  Your RF 
currents leave the topload, go out, touch the earth, flow through the 
soil, to your ground rod, then travel through your ground wire and back 
to the coil.  (yes, I know RF is actually bidirectional, but the 
conceptual model is easier this way).
As that RF current flows merrily through the soil and wire, it radiates 
and couples to other things in the neighborhood, some of which are not 
going to like high power pulses of 200kHz RF.
The coupling is worst when the current path forms a big loop and when 
the victim has a big loop.  After all that's what tesla coils are, 
internally: you have one loop, the primary, that's coupled to another 
loop, the secondary.  We have lots of turns, so the coupling is good for 
a small area.

So, the objective should really be:  put a conductive layer directly 
under the tesla coil, so that the RF path is directly from "topload to 
conductive layer" and doesn't go meand
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