SSTC achieves 36" Streamers! - Thanks to Justin

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Original poster: "Mccauley, Daniel H by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <daniel.h.mccauley-at-lmco-dot-com>




Kudos to Justin.
I took your advice and tried increasing the current to my primary on my SSTC
as opposed to increasing the voltage and the
results were incredible!  With only 240VAC input, I managed to get 36"
streamers from my SSTC for continuous long period runs with no problems
whatsoever.  The very large FET heatsinks were getting very warm (i am fan
cooling them and the MOSFET driver ICs), but the very large FET packages
themselves were relatively cool.

My coil originally had 16 Turns on the primary side.  I had previously tried
to reduce the number of primary turns with zero success.  But Justin had
informed me of the problem.  He mentioned that you need to try to keep the
coupling the same even when reducing the number of turns.  In otherwords,
instead of keeping the primary turns close together when reducing the number
of turns, I should be spacing winding the turns so that the reduce number of
turns still has the same initial winding length has the original 16 turns of
my primary.  Anyways, after an afternoon of trial and error, playing alot
with spacing and turn reduction, I managed to get 36" streamers with 4 Turns
on the primary side spaced at about 2 inches.  I tried going a bit lower,
but performanced started deteriorated after that point.

The Captain