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Re: ASG vs NST....and in this corner!

Hi Christopher,

	Good try and an area I played with much in times of old.

At 03:15 PM 5/1/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Okay, here goes....
>
>Late last night at the Geek Group labs we had one of those thoughts that 
>occur after many hours of consumeing Jolt and tinkering with a group of 
>lunatics.
>
>Tesla coils pruduce high voltage at high frequency. (Duh)
>Also..Audio Signal Genorators pruduce high frequency. (Duh)
>And NST's produce High Voltage (Do you follow the theme here?)
>
>The plan was to create a Tesla Coil emulator on a very small scale.
>We were hoping to get 15KV at about 20Khz way too low on both to be a coil 
>tye discharge, bu t we were just tinkerin'.
>
>We hooked the ASG to the NST and got....JACK! Why?

The audio generator probably has 600 ohms of output resistance.  Normally,
it is meant to drive such difficult loads as 2000 ohm stereo input jacks,
Experimenter's op-amp circuits and those little walkman speakers.  The
power output is probably on the order of 0.15 watts.  Ie. it doesn't have
any output power :-)  

In days of old, I built some rather dramatic amplifiers to drive real power
into ignition coils of cars at high frequency.  At about 80 KHz and 50
volts in, they hit resonance and you can get a nice brush discharges of an
inch or so just like the tube coilers see.  However, my amp liked to blow
up very quickly and it is definitely something you don't want to do with
amplifiers you value!

>We thought it might be due to core saturation in the NST, but we're not 
>sure...any thoughts?

Neon transformers look like big inductors.  They normally run at 60Hz.  You
will never be able to run them in the 100khz due to all kinds of things.
You may be able to find a resonance somewhere but it would be at pretty low
frequency and the results may not be good.

>I'm sure someone has had this idea before, what did you do?

Car ignition coils are designed to run at some pretty good frequencies.
The GM coils can have their steel cores removed and then they can really
ripe.  Try one with a real cheap amp with your audio generator and maybe
you will get something...  No guarantees though...

>If it is the NST, can I get a high Freq transformer that will do the big 
>step up we need?
>
>This is probably an exercise in futility, but there's not much to do untill 
>we can raise the money for the MMC caps.

Salt water caps worked for Tesla....

>
>
>Christopher A. Boden
>The Geek Group
>344 Ionia SW
>Grand Rapids MI
>49503
>(616)-574-4065
>
>The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth!

Cheers,

	Terry