Over-quenching: Followup

["J. B. Weazle McCreath" <weazle-at-hurontel.on.ca> (by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>)]

Hello Coilers;

First I'd like to thank all who replied to my query earlier in the week
regarding over-quenching of my RQ gap.  Today I was able to borrow a 10
amp, 120 volt variac which allows me to vary the air flow in my gap.
My radar tranny is 6 KV -at- 500 mA. so I'm a little low on the volts,
but have lots of current available.

My RQ gap has 7 pipe segments, giving me 6 gaps of .025" each, yielding
a total of .150" if I use all of them.  With 120 volts applied to the
gap blower motor, I could not get the gap to fire at all until I put a
jumper in place to reduce the overall gap to .100" at which time I got
a firing with reasonable consistancy.

Tonite I hooked up the variac and tried various combinations of voltage
to the gap blower motor and number of gap segments used.  After an hour
of fiddling I got the best streamers when I had about 70 volts applied
to the gap blower and 5 segments of the gap in use.  The cap is .016 uF
with the primary tapped at 6.2 turns of the 12 available.  I'm going to
try a slightly smaller cap so I can use more primary turns.


73, Weazle, VE3EAR/VE3WZL

Listening: 147.030+ and 442.075+
E-mail:    weazle-at-hurontel.on.ca
           or ve3ear-at-rac.ca
Web site:  www.hurontel.on.ca/~weazle