Gary Lau wrote:
Hi Jim, On the issue of RF grounds in general, determining the relative quality of one has always been nebulous. I'm pretty sure that the consensus is that the ground quality has a minimal effect at best on streamer length, so I don't think streamer length is a useful metric. You wrote:Give it a shot and see if it works.Short of just seeing if any appliance damage results, are you aware of any means to quantify how well a given setup works, even relative to an alternate setup? I once tried monitoring the AC mains through a high-pass filter for transient spikes (assuming that a better ground results in lower amplitude transients), but uncertainty of how to ground the scope probe (and scope!) made me give up.
You raise a very good point. Looking for transients might work, except that where would you probe? And, even then, if you have a shunt type transient suppressor (like the MOVs found in all those plug strips) it might clip them (dying a little each time, until it catastrophically fails blowing the fuse in the plug strip if you're lucky) To a certain extent the empirical: "I did this and it didn't kill the expensive electronics of my spouse/significant other/parent/children" is what we've all done in the past. OK, but recognizing that we need some quantitative answers. What would be a good experiment? There are two aspects to the transients from TCs.. the radiated field (mostly magnetic near field from the sparks discharging the topload) and conducted (via the power cord, presumably). I'm going to assume that you can kill any differential mode power cord signals with a good line filter. So, we're looking at common mode signals propagated down the power cord (treating the entire cord as a unit) and the radiated fields from the discharge. Could we set up a "victim loop" at some distance to represent a receiver of the radiated fields? And, for the common mode current through the power cord: it couples to the "greenwire ground" in your house and sets up a circuit.. from TC through cord to house wiring to capacitive coupling to topload. How about measuring the RF current in the cord as a whole, using a suitable transformer. _______________________________________________ Tesla mailing list Tesla@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.pupman.com/mailman/listinfo/tesla