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Re: SSTC As a transmitter.



Original poster: "Paul Nicholson by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <paul-at-abelian.demon.co.uk>

Gary wrote:
> This is in conflict with the following statement by John Sutton
> found in 1994 U.S. Patent  No. 5,296,866, "Active Antenna"

I don't see any conflict, although it depends just what the author
is claiming by way of an increase in energy drawn from the source.

>From your quote:
 "...having the effect of absorbing energy from the wave front
  into the antenna from an area of the wave front which is much
  larger than the geometrical area of the antenna."

Have to be careful not to misinterpret this.  There is no new 
physics here that allows the antenna to withdraw arbitrary amounts
of power from the incident field.  I managed to find a cct diag
for this, (albeit on a crank site so I won't give the reference).
This feedback arrangement allows the antenna to operate as
efficiently over a broad range of frequencies as it would
otherwise do by itself only at it's natural resonant frequency.
It allows the antenna to achieve it's best performance
(commensurate with its geometry) across a wide range of frequencies
rather than just those that it is especially resonant at.

However, there is definately nothing here for the cranks to get
excited about. There is no magical new physics going on, it is
just good old EM theory doing its thing.  You can't extract more
energy from the antenna than you could if the antenna was
perfectly tuned and superconducting.   The limit is set by
the geometry, ie the shape, size, reactance, in general the
boundary conditions imposed on the field by the antenna's
conductors and dielectrics.

If the list would tolerate several hundred lines of off-topic
I'd be happy to give a thorough and detailed explanation here of 
how the incident field couples to the antenna, and explain just
what the 'regeneration' is doing here.  I can also try to
explain just what is misleading the cranks to think that they
can suck some huge amount of extra energy from the field,
because there are several subtleties here that can trap the
unwary, and I see these being applied on various web sites.

I wrote:
> A fourth option - that Tesla thought he had some new fundamental
> law of physics to exploit, is even more uncomfortable.  It would 
> be very sad if that were the case.

Dave wrote:
>  Why?

An important point.  We are obliged to trust our scientists,
engineers, and medical doctors.  Few of us can stomach the years of
study it takes to acquire their skills, so we have to trust their
pronouncements.  We expect them to be able to justify their
statements, and we like to assume that they have done the work
(calculations, experiments, etc) which enable them to make their
confident statements about nature.  Tesla seems to be failing this
basic integrity requirement by making statements that sound (to the
laymen at least) like fact, but in reality are unsupported either
by experimental data, or theoretical possiblility. 

Unfortunately, the web contains many Tesla sites that reflect
their authors belief that, if Tesla said it, then a priori it is
likely to be right, and that generations of very bright people who
continue to point out the defects are all either incredibly stupid,
or are operating some sort of conspiracy.  The sheer volume of this
kind of stuff on the web is astonishing, and perhaps points to a
desperate cultural or psychological need for something mystical
beyond the everyday well understood world.  Science is no longer
taught in school, perhaps that's why.  Try to avoid those websites
which take 19th century fallacies, bundle them with some 20th
century pseudoscience, and foist them onto the Net dressed as
plausible hypothesis or facts fit for the 21st century. There are
many such examples, and while they may satisfy their author's sense
of purpose, they contribute nothing to human knowledge.

Ed Phillips wrote:
> In contrast, his earlier writings and lectures were models of
> clarity and patient explanation of the principles involved.

In contrast to his later work.  Is there a clear date which divides
his earlier rational work from his later, let's say, ideas of
doubtful value?  Or was he always a source of unrealistic ideas?

> After Wardenclyffe things indeed changed.

So what happened there?  Did Tesla find himself in an untenable
position wrt his claims, from which he was unable to retreat?
His credibility account with his peers must have drained pretty
quickly.

John wrote:
> This system does not use hertzian waves and Tesla made a point
> of this fact. This system uses currents that flow thru the
> ionosphere as one conductor and the earth as the other.

Ask yourself what makes those currents flow.  A field of course,
so it does use EM waves.  Hertzian?  There is no alternative for
the EM field.  I mentioned the importance of the integrity of
pronouncements by engineers. Here's a case in point where someone
has been led to believe two quite daft and useless things - that
currents can flow without a field to drive them, and that there
is another way to propagate energy through the field other than
by waving the field values up and down.  John, et al, should have
been able to trust Tesla's statements as a responsible engineer,
but he has been let down.  Wonder how many man-years this 
particular double-whammy has wasted over the decades?

> When the voltage is too high there are more lightning strikes
> and vise versa. Tesla said he had worked out the details but
> never revealed what these details were.

Tesla said.

I'm getting bored with all this cranky stuff now - I can only take
so much at a time, let's get back to some real work soon!

Boris wrote:
> Tesla was probably trying to explore what sudden HV subsequent
> kicks can do in way of transmiting electrical power tru the
> system Earth & high atmosphere layer.He seemingly beleived that
> by using enormous power (read big voltage & current pulses) in
> controled fashion might be fruitful (dischargin big tower at
> rate say 6 Hz in ground and clouds respectively)  .

Hey, that's more like it! 

If Tesla was setting out to explore the earth and atmosphere's
electrical response by pinging it (Er, I guess ping is too small
a word for this scale!) then that would be something we can
really understand and approve of, even today.  That would count
as a meaningful and interesting program of research.
--
Paul Nicholson
--