RE: Capacitor Help

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: "Lau, Gary" <Gary.Lau@xxxxxx>

Bear in mind that the stuff going through your RF ground connection is
RF.  Running that through 150 feet of anything is almost as bad as no
connection at all.  Most of the current will go to ground through
capacitance to the floor.  If the only ground connection is that far
distant, a nearby counterpoise is better.

But as others have said, if you will be running your coil in a chicken
wire cage, using the cage itself as RF ground is perfectly acceptable.
Just tie a green-wire ground to it for safety.

One more thing - the quality of your RF ground will have NO perceptible
impact on spark performance.  It's counterintuitive, but folks have
reported forgetting to make ANY connection to the base of their
secondary coil and it still ran.  The consequence of a poor or
non-existant RF ground connection is how much RF travels back through
your mains.  I've always wanted to try to measure this, but again, it's
still down on my to-do list.

Regards, Gary Lau
MA, USA

> Original poster: "MalcolmTesla" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Excellent information.  I'll shoot for steel beams in the roof.  If
that's
> not an option I'll pickup a 150' extension cord from wal-mart and run
an RF
> ground outside to a pipe in the ground.  Like someone mentioned before
I
> don't want to be frying networks, computers or anything else.