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Registered Member #72
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659
The reason that everybody uses copper is that, of the materials that are good electrically, Silver, Copper, Aluminium, Gold, there are outlets in every town of every country that will sell you 10m of any diameter of copper for not all that much money, which doesn't even hold for alluminium. The same goes for what you are most likely to pull out of a skip (dumpster). There's no reason (apart from looks), why you should not use multiple thin copper wires twisted together, maybe 1mm/2.5mm cores salvaged from wiring. Being bare, it won't give you the full Litz wire advantage, but it will be as good as the same surface area of tube, and cheaper.
Actually the Q of the primary is not a mega-problem (compared to the streamers, spark-gap etc), so almost any conductive and non-ferrous material would also do at a pinch, brass, zinc, but see the comments about availablity above.
Once you go ferrous, iron, steel (stainless steel would be quite a challenge), the primary RF resistance does dominate the performance.
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Alternative primary coil materials
