Re: Noob question

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Terry Fritz <vardin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Hi Jim,

After looking over the patent:

http://hot-streamer.com/TeslaCoils/OtherPapers/TeslaPatents/us000593138.pdf

I can make a few suggestions...

Fortunately, this system has a wire between the transmitter coil and 
the receiver coil so it should work well!

I would make two identical cone coils.  One to send and one to 
receive.  They can be any sane distance apart as long as the wire is 
well insulated.  It is fairly important that the two coils be 
matched.  Note that the wire can have tens of thousands of volts on 
it and it could arc to near objects possibly creating a fire hazard.

You may save yourself some work by going to a higher frequency than 
20kHz.  That would use fewer turns of wire and all.  Since there is a 
wire between the coils, our typical tuning programs will not apply 
well.  You might as well just go by wire length as Tesla suggests.

The primary coils should also be identical.  Just several turns of 
thick copper wire should do fine.

For the receiver, you can hook up say small light bulbs.

For the transmitter, any powerful signal source could drive it.  I 
would almost suggest an audio amplifier driven from a signal 
generator.  You could simply tune the frequency to resonate at the 
best point.  But, an audio amplifier might not go much above 
20kHz.  There are ICs that would work at higher frequencies such as 
in my amplifier here:

http://hot-streamer.com/TeslaCoils/Misc/Low-ZAmp/Low-ZAmp.jpg

http://hot-streamer.com/TeslaCoils/Misc/Low-ZAmp/

Once setup, you could just tune the signal generator for the best 
light output at the receiver.  The biggest loss will be at the loose 
coupling of the primary coils.  The system really is just a 
loosely-coupled air-core high voltage transmission line that works at 
high frequency.

I don't think you are going to get a "return of 1000 times the input 
energy."  but it should be an interesting project.

Cheers,

	Terry