Steve Ward wrote:
Any other suggestions on how you could measure these currents? I seem to recall terry fritz had some fiber optic probes, but i was really not sure how that worked, and they also looked to be really expensive and probably finicky if i had to guess. The direct approach would be nice, of course. Ive already considered crude options like a LED bar graph that would read back the peak current value, and of course tell me nothing about the wave-shape. Could also make my own low quality data acq with some micro-controller or something, which honestly might be just as useful unless i have some other solution with really high bandwidth.
A Pearson wideband CT driving a high-speed analog fiber optic link would permit continuous monitoring. A relatively inexpensive commercial video optical link might even work (but you may need to disable the AGC function to maintain linearity). These are readily available on eBay and commercial surveillance businesses.
A link to a PDF file for a DIY analog fiber link that goes from DC to 100 MHz (complements of the US Naval Research Lab) can be found below. These guys run into similar problems safely measuring high currents and high voltages. The calibrator (schematic also included) is more complex than either the transmitter or receiver. The downside is that this system uses two fairly matched laser diodes in a push-pull configuration. You may be able to use this as a start...
http://tinyurl.com/3fu93g2 Bert -- Bert Hickman Stoneridge Engineering http://www.capturedlightning.com *********************************************************************** World's source for "Captured Lightning" Lichtenberg Figure sculptures, magnetically "shrunken" coins, and scarce/out of print technical books *********************************************************************** _______________________________________________ Tesla mailing list Tesla@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.pupman.com/mailman/listinfo/tesla