RE: Terry's DRSSTC

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: "Steve Conner" <steve.conner@xxxxxxxxxxx>

>Seems there has been a lull in DRSSTC work in the past few months

Yea, a lot of the DRSSTC builders seem to be busy with other stuff now.
*remembers his "weekend" DRSSTC abandoned after 6 months


>Im interested to
>see how your "normal" secondaries work compared to the secondaries i
>use, which tend to have lower Q and many more turns than normal

Me too. A secondary with fewer turns and a big topload will have a lower
"Characteristic impedance" (Zo=sqrt(L/C)). If the theories by Malcolm Watts
and Terry Fritz are correct (and if my understanding of them is correct..)
then a secondary with Zo less than (220/6)kOhms will have a loaded Q more
than 6 no matter how long the streamer is. (According to Terry the real part
of streamer impedance is always 220k irrespective of the length.)

So, I take that to mean that you can grow infinitely large streamers
relative to the secondary size, limited only by flashover considerations, by
just designing it to have a Zo no greater than 36 kOhms.

The Zo of Steve (ward)'s Mini ISSTC resonator is 53kOhms (according to a
simulation I did with FANTC) and it topped out at 27". It would be
interesting to see how much more streamer length could be got by adding
extra topload to bring the Zo down to 36k.

I should also try the resonator from my mini OLTC on a DRSSTC. It is quite
similar in size to Steve's Mini ISSTC one but has a Zo of 100k. If my theory
is correct, I would find that I couldn't get it to absorb as much power as
Steve's did, and it would produce smaller streamers than 27".

Steve C.