Hi All,

Paul and I have been real busy getting the Q variation experiment going.  Happily, it is now finally working and reporting very interesting results!!  It is really VERY complex so I will go over what it all is about...

We are studying what effect 'weather' has on the "Q" of secondary coils.  By putting high voltage 'step function' into a secondary coil, we "ping" the coil such that it resonates.  We then do the FFT of the resonation to find all kinds of parameters.  I am doing the physical experiment stuff and Paul is doing the UNIX computer and high-powered math stuff.  Paul can remotely work on the software on the computers here and just "make" it all work :-))  It's cool having Paul fix the software on my computers overnight so it's ready to go when I wake up ;-))

So here it goes.  I have a secondary (my "big" coil sitting in the loft out in the garage basically exposed to outdoor temperature and humidity (a "drafty" garage to say the least)):

http://hot-streamer.com/temp/Paul/4-08/P4080009.jpg

The coil is "pinged" every five minutes at 10Hz for 10 seconds by the "pinger" that puts a series of 2500 volt step functions into the coil:

http://hot-streamer.com/temp/Paul/4-06/P4060003.jpg
http://hot-streamer.com/temp/Paul/4-06/P4060004.jpg
http://hot-streamer.com/temp/Paul/4-06/P4060005.jpg

http://hot-streamer.com/tssp/3-30/TCMApinger001.jpg
http://hot-streamer.com/tssp/3-30/TCMApinger002.jpg
http://hot-streamer.com/tssp/3-30/TCMApinger003.jpg

The pinger uses a cool resonant drive but I am not sure it could power a "real" Tesla coil...

The base current from the pinged coil is detected by a Pearson 4100 1:1 current monitor and the signal is feed back to the TEK 3012 scope through a long 50 ohm terminated cable.  The scope averages 64 pings from the 10 second burst:

http://hot-streamer.com/temp/Paul/4-08/P4080008.jpg
http://hot-streamer.com/temp/Paul/4-08/P4080006.jpg

The old laptop running Metratek software:

http://www.metratek.com/products.html

Far far better the "Dilbert committee" TEK software!!!) takes the data every 10 minutes over a serial link from the scope and stores it to a shared account "bob" on hot-streamer.com via internal Ethernet as CSV files of each waveform's data.  It is all fairly well automatically updated in real time:

http://hot-streamer.com/bob/qvar/data/expt0/

This data is then picked up every hour by my Sun Blade100 UNIX computer via local FTP for analysis by Paul's software:

http://hot-streamer.com/tssp/3-30/sun.jpg

It also pulls data off a very nearby 110+ year old weather station at the CSU campus across the street from me and figures out all the "details".

http://ccc.atmos.colostate.edu/cgi-bin/wx_form.pl

http://hot-streamer.com/temp/Paul/4-08/P4080010.jpg

http://www.abelian.demon.co.uk/tssp/tcma/

The 64 bit Sun computer with 640Meg of RAM (ok, maybe that's overkill :-))) crunches that data and stuff with Paul's programs and store the results to a nice web page at:

http://hot-streamer.com/bob/qvar/results/expt0/index.html

For you "results oriented" folks, the above page is the "important" one ;-))  It shows that the Q dropped wildly when it rained.  The frequency of the harmonics took a dive tonight as it dried up here.  Only in Colorado do you see the humidity drop from 100% to 10% in six hours :-))  We may have missed the snow here since the prairie dogs have lost their woolly coats....  But spring has "interesting" weather too...  All of Paul's programs do the data collection and crunching stuff.  He is obviously real good at this ;-))

http://www.abelian.demon.co.uk/tssp/

We "think" that water falling on the near roof is affecting the coil's Q greatly:

http://hot-streamer.com/temp/Paul/4-08/P4080011.jpg

It seemed that once rain fell on the roof the coil's Q instantly dropped like 80%!!  I was going to hose down the roof tonight to check but the humidity is real low so a bad time to go messing with things...

All this is pretty young and raw but Paul and I thought we had better report "something".  It's not like we have been sleeping recently ;-))  Paul is like 8 hours ahead of me so the time zones do not match well, but one of us is usually 'sort of' awake :-)) 

Lots more experimenting to be done to track down what is affecting what...  It's all very young and new so not at all sure what the "great meaning" is but data is pouring in.  Great fun!!!

Cheers,

	Terry