Today it did power arc for a second, but that was when the
gap had heated up quite a bit, so
it is actually very close to power arcing. Also once the
spark gap heats up, the coil would go
from throwing 10" sparks to barely breaking out with 3".
According to my cro, it _is_ running at something like
3-5kbps. Thing is, i cant get a proper
reading off the scope at high sweep rates, it refuses to
trigger and give a stable trace so i put
it back to 2 ms/div and could quite clearly see the 50Hz
modulation as blocks of hash, but
sticking out of the top this hash, there were 40 or so
spikes almost all the same height,
increasing in frequency toward the center and spreading
again at the end. ie, these are the
bangs and they are occurring as one would expect, faster at
the peak of the supply voltage
hard to explain without sending a picture, but as usual,
haven't got a camera...
ben