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Registered Member #72
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659
Unleashed wrote ...
But since i'm going to run this TC on the third floor of my home, can i run a 9-10meters cable from the TC to the ground without problems?
Well, yes you can. But why? Just because you can do something without problems, for instance recite a valedictory before disposing of any durable product, doesn't mean it will acheive anything, or that you should.
A TC has very high voltage AC on that terminal thing on the top, which induces a voltage in everything that has a non-zero capacitance with it, from which a current will flow according to its impedance back to the bottom terminal of the secondary.
If you are on the third floor, then the most useful thing you can do is to run several ground radials out from the bottom of your TC, to the earth pin of each mains socket in the room, to each bit of exposed water pipe, balcony railings, set of metal shelves etc. Failing that, one wire to one socket will still be better than 10m out of the window down to yard.
OK, most people don't do that. They use one connection to the mains earth, or via a long wire to a remote bit of dirt. I do what I recommend, as it minimises the interference to other stuff in my house, and in the neighbours'. Basically it tries to complete as much of a Faraday cage around the TC and connected to the secondary bottom terminal, without physically going to the bother of building one, just using the conductivity of all the stuff that is around it. If you connect one wire to one socket, you are energising the random antenna that is your house wiring more strongly than if you recruit all the conductors in the room. A lot of people get away with that. If you drop 10m of wire out of the window, you are making a nice long inductor/antenna.
Registered Member #1792
Joined: Fri Oct 31 2008, 08:12PM
Location: University of California
Posts: 527
Sigurthr wrote ...
Being a Ham I fully agree and understand the importance of a proper ground plane grounding system when dealing with most RF sources, but I have a practical question for you: How do you stop the ground plane from sapping energy out of the system due to induced eddy currents from the Primary's magnetic field? I tried a similar setup using a large sheet of steel under the coil and got zero output from the secondary and the ground plane got VERY hot very fast. I tried increasing the vertical distance between the tesla resonator and the ground plane but could not achieve a set up where the ground plane was not badly drawing energy from the coil, even if heating was reduced below perceivable levels.
From my experience a ground plane is good in theory for a TC but bad in practice.
Put slots in your ground plane. If you current is flowing in a circle in your primary the induced eddy currents want to flow in a circle in the opposite direction. Put radial slots to break that current path. It's the same purpose of the laminations in a steel transformer core. You still get the capacitive return path from the top of the secondary to the bottom, which is the purpose of the ground plane.
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Correctely ground a TC
