On Sun, 13 Jul 2025, Robin wrote:
1) wrap a coil around a strong magnet (or maybe just an Iron rod?), that is
aligned with the Earth's magnetic field,
such that the Earth's field lines are concentrated in the body of the magnet
(or Iron rod).
2) Attach a capacitor to the coil such the resonant frequency of the tank
circuit matches the Schumann resonance.
3) See if any energy can be harvested from the circuit.
Tesla was working at 1KHz, sometimes 5KHz. The Corums ran simulations
with planetary Zenneck surface waves and supported this, also finding that
10KHz and above was fairly useless, and above 30KHz insignificant. Tesla
said the same, discovered from experiment. "Earth resonance" is a 1KHz
phenomenon. (Plus all the overtones of 11.8Hz, or of 8Hz if you prefer.)
So, just need to wind a 1KHz LC resonator, with extremely high Q. Provide
lots of side-taps, and add a series of low-loss 1uF capacitors. I think
you can get huge litz wire from cheap $10 induction cooker coils sold on
eBay. Also, low loss HV 0.33uF capacitors for induction cooker main tank
circuit.
More practical would be to experiment with the Sutton Spaniol active VLF
antenna, to verify the physics. Never tried it myself. Their trick is to
make a perfect conductor by the same method as superregen radio: add an
active circuit for negative resistance, in parallel with the loop antenna,
adjusted to cancel out the resistance of the coil and capacitor. It's a
DIY hobbyist superconductor resonator. I did build one of these
canceled-resistance inductors. It acts just like a hall-effect sensor,
since it integrates changes in magnetic flux (it linearly detects
approaching magnets, just like an analog hall sensor does. Use this as
arrays, to build superconductor shield panels. Weird battery-powered
superconductor phenomenon.)
So, we must adjust our Sutton/spaniol antenna for stability while
shielded, then remove shielding and see how large a wave appears. It will
SEEM to be unwanted oscillation. That's what conventional hobbyists would
expect, and they'd simply ignore the results. (Probably a gigantic 60Hz
and 120Hz wave appears. Ignore it as unwanted noise? But what if you're
actually seeing resonant power-theft, with significant wattage!)
But, if you intentionally built an "artificial" superconducting coil, then
obtained some massive received signals, we should properly put it down
to "mag
loop" physics, and ascribe it to all the weird results seen with
electrically small
radio antennas having immense Q-factor. (Heh, it's an infinite Q in this
case, same as supercon loops.) If any resonant RF signal impinges on the
coil, a sine wave should
start ramping up and up. It will stop increasing as soon as the radiative
losses from loop-antenna's transmission are equal to the incoming received
signal. Much like charging up a capacitor from ambient DC e-fields, but
in this case it's the oscillatory analog.
The Corums say this doesn't work, because the sharp Earth-resonances
wander around on a time scale of ~20 seconds. So, you can never get the
tuning of your resonator correct. It would somehow have to track the
moving planetary resonances in realtime.
But the Sutton-Spaniol "black hole antenna" includes a negative inductance
circuit. That way it behaves just like a tuned circuit, while also being
broadband, and building up huge sine waves of any incoming frequency.
I think these weird VLF devices are ignored because if they show
unexpected results, everyone insists that it's just self-oscillation, some
sort of unexplained circuit-instability, and couldn't possibly be caused
by the physics of high-Q receiving antennas. (The situation is analogous
to having a real FE device, but where it required batteries in order to
produce the bizarre effect. Nobody will believe that it's real,
regardless of measurements. The presence of a DC power supply is
driving skeptics crazy.)
Heh, so just use a Sutton-Spaniol antenna to extract enough ambient VLF
power that we can close-the-loop and power the several FET op-amp stages.
Let the antenna-coil grow warm. Plus a bank of light bulbs too?
PS
Tesla secrets, dunno if I put them here before...
1. an incandescent light bulb will light up when held near a Tesla coil.
Even a BD-10 hand-held "violet ray" T.C. can light a tungsten bulb via
ionic impact (it's "Tesla carbon button" mode.) But the bulb must contain
hard vacuum, no argon gas. Aquarium bulbs and lectern bulbs are that
type. So are the 7.5W and 15W "golf ball" incandescent lamps.
In other words, when Tesla plugs a huge light-bulb into the Colorado
Springs dirt (in that Beograd Tesla movie,) that easily could have been
real. But you'd need a pre-1930s antique light bulb, if you wanted to try
it today.
2. I recently realized that the secondary of a Tesla coil is also a
microwave resonator. The stack of windings is a dielectric transmission
line, a conductor of displacement current. In pulse mode, and running at
high voltage, it could put out VHF or even GHZ pulses of stunning peak
wattage. How? It's because a single cylindrical coil is the same as a
stack of parallel-plate capacitors in series, like a tall stack of
electrically-floating copper disks. EM pulses jump directly from disk to
disk, going at a foot per nanosecond (that for a coil in air, slower for
one embedded in urethane varnish. That's the usual physics of a
resonator, when operating far above resonance. And also, a long long
stack of close-spaced metal disks is an odd type of transmission line, and
can guide EM waves.
Far below resonance, The same secondary coil acts like a very long wire,
where an EM wave has to follow the length of the spiralling wire (perhaps
becoming a 200KHz quarter-wave resonant stub.)
So, when Tesla discharged his coils, using a megavolt spark-gap (with all
plasma-streamers inhibited,) he was exploring a regime of few-nanosecond
pulses, with peak currents similar to that of huge capacitor banks, and
peak-powers of unknown megawatts. Hundreds, thousands of megawatts? But
only five or ten nanoseconds duration, as the "discharge wave" proceeds
down his extra-coil at lightspeed. It's not a coil, instead it's a
capacitor with very thick dielectric, where a discharge is mostly a
displacement-current between the parallel wires.
He reported having discharges which violently exploded his wooden coil
structures. But today the big tesla coils never do that! (Big tesla
coils are supposed to make fractal lightning bolts. Tesla considered this
a malfunction. Yet today, if your large tesla coil DOESN'T make any
fractal lightning bolts, you'll consider THAT a malfunction.)
So, build a ten kilowatt TC, suppress all lightning, then crank up the
power, and see if instead it makes deafening bangs, and dangerous plastic
shrapnel. But perhaps you'd need a megavolt spark-gap in order to see
this sort of discharge, while suppressing the slow-growing plasma-
streamers. Your secondary has become a half-megavolt capacitor bank.
(What's the series microfarads of the secondary of a floor-standing tesla
coil, if all the turns are sliced, so they behave as a tall stack of
separate rings? Knowing that, we could calculate the stored joules, and
the peak power in a few-nanoseconds pulse. Try all this stuff at 20V
first, with mercury-wetted contacts, oscilloscope compatible.)
(((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty http://staff.washington.edu/wbeaty/
beaty, chem washington edu Research Engineer
billb, amasci com UW Chem Dept, Bagley Hall RM74
x3-6195 Box 351700, Seattle, WA 98195-1700
