Re: magnifier questions - tips from the master

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: "Daniel McCauley" <dhmccauley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Here are some magnifier tips that Richard Hull sent to me awhile back . . .
He is the master, so i would following these tips carefully!


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The resonant frequency of the secondary or the extra coil turn out to be
pretty unimportant!  The key is to make the driver secondary very tightly
coupled and have only about 100-200 turns of heavy gauge wire on a form more
or less 6-10 times the diameter of the resonator or extra coil.  The
resonator/extra coil must have a lot more inductance than the driver or,
barring that at least a natural resonant frequency of half that of the
driver secondary.  The resonator must be toploaded to beyond apparent reason
and near to insanity.  A four inch diameter extra coil should have at least
a 50"X8" toroidal terminal.  Part of the art is in fashioning this terminal
system.  Even though the terminal of most tesla systems is a high impedance
point, the magnifier must be so grossly top loaded that the output impedance
is very low.  This means an arcing Q that is ridiculously low.  The primary
is tuned for whatever makes the largest spark.  It is important that no
visible corona exist on the transmission line.  This means a giant diameter
line.  1" copper pipe minimum.  The key is to deliver large amounts of RF
current into the extra coil's base.

No magnifier can be designed by radio theory.  Only efficient RF
communications systems can be designed by radio theory.  The magnifier is a
study in supplying the maximum amount of RF energy to a massive capacitive
terminal and maximizing the RF losses via electrical break down into a GAS
LOAD at STP (standard temperature and pressure)....the atmosphere.

 The rotary break must be capable of supplying pulsed RF energy to this gas
load in a unit time shorter than the bulk deionization or relaxation time of
the arc channel.  In this fashion the load is kept dynamic and at each new
energy pulse delivery, the RF energy travels out further on the ionized path
of the last pulse before the channel cools (deionizes).  This allows the
channel to not only be renewed, but slowly grow or extend out farther with
each pulse and if it attaches to a grounded or near ground object, the arc
channel will stay connected for seconds at a time.  The mystery is what
breaks the channel, ultimately.

A tesla coil or a magnifier is not a refined RF machine, it is a gas load
matched ionization system.  (as built by the amateur)  In the end, after ten
years and hundreds of coils large and small, I stopped calculating as I
became as Tesla said, 'able to see in my mind's eye and craft with my hand
that which was proportionate and functional', not through anyhting so
elegant as equations or as silly as mysticism, but by constant application
and the doing.  A synergy moves into the breast that assists the adroit and
adept at the work.  What works often flys in the face of reason.  It took
ten years for me to realize that the art of tesla coiling and making big
sparks was not in the coil, but in understanding the ionization of gases and
how to match electrical systems to this strange, dynamic load.

Look at how our stuff evolved over the tapes and you will get the idea.
every magnifier got smaller and produced similar results with less energy
(in most cases).  The culmination was in magnifier 11E (only seen on the
later report tapes.) >10 feet of hot spark out of a 4" diameter X 13" long
resonator wound with #30 wire.  Part of the success was our design and
discovery of the series quench rotary back in 1994 allowing proper quenching
at tunable break rates.  Ed hopped on the design the momnent he saw how
effective it was for our magnifiers and the benefit it gave his own
fledgling system back in 96-97.  He never worked the tiny resonators, to the
10:1 spark to coil length ratios, though, like we did.  Tesla never even
achieved this goal, but his stuff was made with the crappy materials of his
time.  We used the best insulation and 90 years of advancement in material
science he didn't have.

Hope this helped.

Richard Hull
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Dan