[NewCandle] light em up

[Nick Reiter]

Happy Gnue Years, all,

Well not even Yule could stop me from continuing to
mess with the Thomas oscillator and LEDs, and I have a
few new notions and observations to share.

First of all, its possible the Thomas circuit has a
couple of modes it can oscillate in, OR I was simply
limping with a lossy low Q component or two.  Day
after Christmas, I was playing around with the
breadboarded arrangement in the kitchen, and tried
tweaking the capacitance from collector to base,
mainly to replace two 100pF caps in parallel with a
single 220pF.  BWHAM!  The bank of 58 LEDs lit up
blazes, and a finger placed on a wire from the AV plug
input gives a hearty RF finger burn.  The current
through the LED string was now quite a bit over the
limit of the d'Arsonval meter, so I had to resort to
my Fluke.  We were now running up in the 2.5 to 3.5 mA
range, using two 9 volt batteries in series to power
the oscillator.  Voltage at the AV plug DC side was
about 150V.

Now we are getting some serious RFI that made
measuring Vc a bit cagey, though the current reading
through the LED string seemed realistic.

The Q of the oscillator is definitely up, and we are
delivering more power to the LEDs.  With a V+ of 16V
(one of the batteries is a bit bum) and a draw-current
of 50mA, re-doing the numbers we are close to about
50% efficiency of power out to power in (as opposed to
8-9% when she was oscillating weakly before).

OTOH, there does not seem to be much of any deviation
to the ratio of light output to current input.  So
still no anomaly there, it would seem.

I am, though, seeing more of the fun stuff associated
with oscillators running in the zone.  Moving my hand
around the batteries will brighten the LEDs up and
increase the AV plug current by about 20 to 30%.  We
are playing in the antenna engineers realm now.

I am keeping busy with trying some extraneous
"systems" to tie to the ground or the RF side, like an
old TC secondary toroid or an orgone accumulator or
some of Sam's extended "topological nightmare"
micro-inductive coil arrays.

I've continued to follow the Hartmann discussion list
re: SEC and Dr. Stiffler, and to me it looks like some
steam is running out and the threads have gone off on
tangents more.  Maybe its just the holidays, though.

Jones, did you have your RF Engineer consultant friend
characterize the circuits yet?

Man o man, I hadn't kept up with solid state Tesla
Coils for a while.  There are some bookoo links from
Richard Hull's book list web page.  With IGBTs these
guys have been kicking TC ass!  One engineer /
hobbyist was getting 8 to 10" arcs off of a secondary
with only 35 watts input power.

Best to all,

NR

The Holy Grail 'neath ancient Roslin waits.
The blade and chalice guarding o'er Her gates. 
Adorned in the masters' loving art, She lies;
She rests at last beneath the starry skies.


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