Re: C of Earth...

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Jim Lux by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net>


----- Original Message -----
From: "Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
To: <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2001 5:24 PM
Subject: Re: C of Earth...


> Original poster: "Terry Fritz" <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>
>
> Hi Jim,
>
> Neat!  Assuming we are running 100MW at 20MV at 5 amps and assuming we can
> loose 20% of the power on the way (we are desperate after all :-)), Ohm's
> law says that the resistance needs to be less than 800,000 Ohms.  Thus 10
> ohms would be great!  In fact, we could use the ionosphere as a very
> conductive top load then with a giant capacitance to drive the frequency
> down to the magic Shumman resonances if that is even needed.  That big one
> at around 7Hz looks good:

The Schumann resonance is a cavity resonance, i.e. 1 trip around the world
takes about 1/7th second.  Too bad that it is pretty low Q, not because of
losses, but because the cavity isn't very uniform.  Problem #1, the earth
isn't a sphere (actually, trivially different distances, but there you are).
Problem #2, the "waveguide" between ground and ionosphere is hardly of
constant height (radically different in day and night, and mostly
nonexistent at night (need that solar UV to ionize the air). Problem #3, the
ground isn't all that consistent a conductor, and the effective dielectric
constant changes, so the wave doesn't propagate at the same speed. Over
seawater, epsilon is 80+, and conductivity is great. Over polar caps, not so
good.

>
> http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a10799.html
>
> Having a very low resistance like 10 ohms is really important because when
> the load of the city is put on the coil to transmitter voltage is going to
> drop like a rock.  A prelude to horrible problem #2 :-))  The low
> resistance may also be able to be sacrificed for a lower altitude since
> getting tethered terminals up to 80kM is going to be a terrible problem
> (#3) all in it's self.

My handy calculation assumed a end electrode in the ionosphere equal in area
to the cross section of the conductive path (i.e. 10 km x 1 km).  I suspect
the resistance between points, or wires, or some reasonable sized thing, is
somewhat higher.

One would probably want to charge the system with some other scheme than a
wire.  Why not use nuclear power in the form of fusion.  Energetic particles
created in a fusion reaction, crossing the magnetic field lines of earth
will create a very nice current/voltage pulse in the ionosphere.  It has
been demonstrated ("Teak" shots from Johnston Island), to the point of
transmitting significant power all the way to Hawaii, some several hundred
km away, as well as producing a nice synthetic aurora that lasted several
hours. The mere engineering details of smoothing out the somewhat pulsed
nature of the power transmission are left as an exercise for the reader.
>
> I think the number 800uF was introduced for the capacitance so the
> inductance needed is...  646mH  Not bad at all.  It would also appear that
> the ground is conductive enough that we would not need the giant copper
> ground strap.

Except in places like over the polar caps, where the loss increases
dramatically, particularly at lower frequencies. This was a real problem
with Omega (running at around 10 kHz).


  If the low ionospheric resistance between our to terminals
> hold true, then we can worry about the loading the city will place on our
> system.  One must wonder with such low resistances if convention high
> voltage equipment at 60Hz would do just as well...  DC current is probably
> not an option due to the problems in transforming the voltages.  Would not
> want to repeat Edison's mistake again :-))
>
> Cheers,
>
> Terry
>