RE: Does a "regulating" coil really waste energy?

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

Original poster: "Lau, Gary by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <Gary.Lau-at-hp-dot-com>

Please correct me if I'm mistaken - I thought that the secondary Q was
unimportant since streamer "losses" drive the Q into the dirt, but that
maximizing primary Q was still desirable?

Gary Lau
MA, USA

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Tesla list [mailto:tesla-at-pupman-dot-com] 
Sent:	Tuesday, May 28, 2002 10:08 AM
To:	tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
Subject:	Re: Does a "regulating" coil really waste energy?

Original poster: "Dave Larkin by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>"
<teslaman15-at-hotmail-dot-com>

You are quite right.  The myth that off axis inductance directly 'wastes' 
energy is a hangover from the old days.  All it does is reduce k a little, 
which may lead to slightly increased spark gap losses beacuse of the longer 
'notches'.

More generally on the subject of real time tuning - Greg Leyh used a monster 
litz wire tuner on his big coil, and quite a few others have tried other 
schemes since, no-one has reported any amazing benefits.
The Tesla coil is actually a fairly low Q device (under sparking 
conditions), so these small alterations seem to make little difference.

-Dave-