Robert Golka doing well and still doing science.

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

Original poster: "Mike" <induction-at-comcast-dot-net> 

Hello all,
                 My name is Mike and I've been working with Bob Golka a 
number of years now.
I am in his lab as I write this, we had a high speed cable web connection 
pulled in because, as you know, the web is a great research tool.
I ended up at this site because I was given the task of scanning into the 
computer many of the pictures he has in a photo album. In with the album 
was a printout of some comments of his work at Wendover and the large coil 
there from this message group, going back some time.
In prior web searches of his name, I've hit this site before but with so 
many hits, I had only paused, looked and kept going for the actual item I 
was seeking at the time.
Reading the messages, I came back here, got added to the list, read some 
threads and saw some interesting work still goes on
As he is not as patient with computers as I am, I often end up doing the 
computer projects and this has included doing digital metering for the 
voltage, current, vacuum (where needed) and other electrical data, with one 
computer interfaced digital meter per function and one dedicated computer 
per each to record the data. Of course this includes another and faster 
machine for the digital movies that back up the VCR tapes. Slower and older 
machines serve nicely the metering jobs.
Right now Bob is out in the mid-west on some field research for a couple of 
weeks, so I got the picture scanning job and reminded of the messages I read.
Yes, there were some interesting adaptations he used in the Wendover 
project for materials to make that large coil with but when you are in such 
a remote area, you make do with what is available, such as the (laughed at) 
use of porcelain no longer used toilets as stand-offs for the primary. As 
there was so much rebar in the hangar floor, he used what he could to help 
that situation. The point is, he used what he could, pretty or not and it 
worked.
It has also been said that he's left more than a few people less than 
pleased when he does not mince words and yes, I've been there, had that, too.
Still, he's put the time in, what, four decades and counting with a whole 
lot of work. In the search for Ball Lightning, as many of you know, there 
was a lot of coiling, high voltage and lower voltage high current work.
Here on the East Coast, I've worked with him on some smaller coils that did 
only maybe 30 foot discharges, nothing quite on the Wendover scale; I think 
he got ~81 feet with that critter.
Some years back, as I work in high power induction heaters ~600 kW output 
and lower, it was decided to try something a little different.
We needed some high voltage at high power for an experiment but also wanted 
a clean wave form, not chopped up with hash and we wanted a fairly 
consistent output.
The larger coil and spark gap that existed nearby was too much for the 
project so we elected to make a smaller coil, skip the spark gap, use a set 
of large balls in his collection for the top of the coil and drove it with 
an induction heater Bob had got his hands on.
The machine was equipped with a MHz oscillator RF section, so I rebuilt it 
with a conventional 450 kHz section instead, of which all the parts were 
available from my work place. We traded the Mc parts for the Kc parts as an 
even trade.
An extra tank cap was added to the induction heater to get the frequency 
lower and as it is the nature of induction heaters to have high currents in 
the work coil and RF tank, we setup a one turn primary of water cooled 3/8 
inch tubing. We knew the area which the Tesla coil was going to resonate in 
for each different size ball.
In this test, we were using a Lepel tube type 2.5 kW machine, modified. 
These machines are a free running oscillator with a grid feedback coil 
inserted inside the tank coil. The outside work or output coil is 
electrically the lower end of the internal tank coil.
So, what rings in the tank coil is inductively coupled to the grid or 
feedback coil and where the tank rings is where the oscillator will run, 
tracking tank inductance changes.
The next step was to modify the grid coil so it took the signal feedback 
from the Tesla coil and locked onto that, as long as the frequency range 
was within the value of the induction tank and main coil.
Because we wished to have variable power, it was handy that the induction 
heater had a built in SCR controller that controlled the primary power to 
the plate transformer, had an instrument input so an external rectified DC 
signal could be used to keep the driving power at any constant level we 
wished. It of course had the standard pot for manual control from zero to 
full power.
As most induction heater builders are not concerned with line frequency 
hum, they are not usually well filtered on the plate supply, unless the job 
calls for it (pipe welding at fast speeds will have a ripple visible in the 
welds, like a phonograph record, so those are filtered well).
We noted that the line frequency hum could be heard in the discharge so we 
added a 25 hy filter choke rated at 1.6 amps, several large filter caps to 
the tube plate supply and that was fixed.
The resulting discharge was pure RF, no noise, no sputter, really clean and 
the nicest discharge I've seen compared to a standard driven coil. The 
thing ran in the ~280 kHz range. It was nice to not have to worry about Gap 
adjustments and we were able to control the power very well in that experiment.
In other work ongoing, we have been using a large glow discharge tube, 2 
feet wide, 6 feet tall (Bob is known to do things on a larger scale).
For that, we made a DC power supply 2600 volts at 10 amps, very well 
filtered. Current control range is 400 microamps through 10 amps continuos 
and is rated at 100 percent duty cycle. We have been doing sprite support 
research, charting what power makes what light spectra at what light 
levels. At 6 feet spacing, the tube goes out from the glow mode to the dark 
mode so we did not need control under 400 microamps. So we use glow mode 
and arc modes. Here is a link for those not aware of atmospheric sprites 
work that we are supporting.
<http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~cpbl/press/williamsNov2001/>http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~cpbl/press/williamsNov2001/
We are still working on the ball Lightning issue in various projects. Part 
of the pictures I have to scan in are those from Bob's dual railroad diesel 
locomotive one megawatt discharges and they are most interesting. Once 
digitized from the originals, at some point he plans to have them up on a 
web site or at least digitally saved.
Also, in the discharge area, we have stills (screen shots) and digital 
movies of 3 large roundish striations (basket ball sized) and of that or 
greater spacing inside the discharge tube that maintain position for ~3 
minutes and the frame by frame study of that formation. Not Ball Lightning, 
they do show some very interesting plasma formations and were mainly round. 
Those I could email, as the web site FTP upload area reported being full on 
this site, because I tried to send a few.
So, I thought I would report Bob is still hard at work, has expanded his 
research area to match current technologies. Tesla coils not abandoned, he 
has stored the largest gap chamber, one made for NASA, the chamber ends are 
each 900 pounds of copper and water cooled, so are the inside gap 
electrodes, rated at a constant several megawatts. They were used to make a 
atmosphere plasma discharge with the power supply being hundreds of 
submarine batteries (16,000 amps discharge each at 7000 amp hour rating). 
That system used a high pressure blast of air across the gap to make a high 
power plasma which tested various thermal tiles at really high temperatures 
and air speeds.
So, he has this huge gap, just in case he needs to use it. Thing weighs a 
ton, really.
Regards,
                 Mike