'Second Light'

I put in some work on the coil support, and sorted out some better wiring. With the main components now located all together on the support frame the old thin, long, wiring was replaced with nice short runs of thick car battery lead cable. The RF ground connection was also replaced with 2 inch wide copper strap. It is quite thin but has plenty of surface area for those RF currents to use.


			

Performance:

Based on the results of the first run, we put plenty of top load on. The spark gap had had a couple of the gap spacings increased so we could achieve the same overall gap size with fewer gaps in series. The results were about the same as the first runs, which wer pretty good! The gap still performed OK but I think that towards the end of testing, the performance was less; I think this may be due to oxidation on the gap electrodes and intend to do a before-and-after electrode cleaning test, next time.

We decided to run with just the smallest (my) toroid and leave off the two largest (Mike's), to show a guest the ozone producing power of loads of small purple sparks (this is what happened on the very first run). Surprisingly, we were now getting lots of pretty decent length streamers! It looked cool (much better than just violet fuzz!). This was probably evidence of the better tank wiring, and the new ground strap.

I still have to make the fan box for cooling the gap, although, it stays pretty cool for short run as it is! Next test will be long duration.