Hi from Kansas -- Physics teacher / experimenter

[Jim Deane]

Hi all,

I've had an account here for quite a while, but as a consequence of an extreme level of busyness and a certain amount of absent-mindedness, I registered here and then kind of forgot about it for about two years.

Oops.

I'm Jim, a physics teacher and sometimes researcher, electronics experimenter, inactive-but-need-to-get-back-on-the-air ham kc0lpv , and general science and technology enthusiast. You can also find me on twitter at twitter.com/jim_deane where I just posted about finishing my latest project kit. Next on the bench is building the MIT Cosmicwatch muon detector. I occasionally post on a blog, dophysics.wordpress.com , which is where I'll be documenting the Cosmicwatch build.

I'm a degreed physicist and a high school teacher, and have done some research teaching at the university level. I've done quite a bit of work with QuarkNet, the US plasma physics researcher-teacher alliance, and have had the great fortune of spending time at particle physics research experiences at Fermilab and CERN [Edit -- and, relevant to this forum, PPPL]. I'm a follower of many electronics and science blogs, Youtube channels, pages, and groups. I play guitar slightly less terribly than I did before. Greatly enjoy history, art, and music.

[Doug Coulter]

Gee, I guess everyone else is asleep at the wheel here, or someone would have chimed in - I really don't mean to be the main or only poster here so I hold off sometimes. I myself have been super busy doing what I consider mundane but related infrastructure, both just plain "living off the grid" but mainly fusor prep stuff for the ion trap experiments. But most of it is pretty boring till I have some experimental results, so I haven't been posting myself...it's just "turning the handle till the results come out" at present. Making RF at the required levels is no joke (10's of KV)...and now I understand why the guys who made the early cyclotrons put their final stepup stages in their own vacuum tank (RF in the shack, insane corona, losses)...even at the cost of making it hard to work with otherwise.

So, I'll say Welcome Aboard, and let us know what you get up to!

[Donovan Ready]

Sorry, Doug. I read his post earlier and thought I'd wait, because I don't feel all that hot today..

Welcome, Jim!

[Doug Coulter]

Hope it gets better, my friend.

[johnf]

Hi Jim
I'm worse than Donovan at the mo
New farm to setup 100km from present one so multi trips per week leaving an incredible carbon footprint until I power on in the shed over there so I can use the nissan leaf to stop polluting the atmosphere

check out some of my posts in eye candy I do real physics as a day job

[Jim Deane]

Nice to 'meet' you all, as you can see there are some delays in my response time. I'm uh...a long way away?

I'll go check out some of the other parts of the forum and see what you all are talking about. I just received my first good vacuum setup (classroom, ~10mTorr) since the last one was "borrowed and then never seen again" a decade ago. But it gets my toes in the water...

[Doug Coulter]

Yeah, long way away....Further than New Zealand? Think how hard it is for John, having to be upside down all the time, in the wrong season, and having to watch his drains spin the wrong way. He has to dig this huge hole over his head just to get on the right side of the flat earth, to post! </attempt at humor>

This place is either dead of jumping - it depends on what we're up to. A lot of the time the best people here are busy with something they are passionate about - that's part of what makes them good people. Then...we show and tell one another what were were doing while we weren't posting....
I'm busy as can be with infrastructure issues, being off grid means that "you are that village it takes to get anywhere" - and with some relatively boring initial work on a new theory for fusor work that IS panning out, but slowly. I am developing some new math for the region everyone else avoids - the boundary between molecular and viscous flow in vacuum, (my deal is even trickier as charged particles act differently vs density than uncharged, so it's really turf everyone ran away from trying to analyze). Some initial guesses are panning out, at least partly, and now I'm beginning to be able to put at least orders of magnitude on some numbers it's obvious you'd have to add to some of the ion trapping and recirculating math - as well as their exponents. The theoretical situation was "that bad" - and worse.

But I'm working in a region that requires significant work to just do an experiment. Tell a radio ham you need some tens of kilovolts at any impedance between a few K and a few hundred K, possibly a non sinusoid and you're not sure where in a band of 2-100 mhz your signal or bandwidth is going to be just yet.
And watch their face turn white.
Any one of those things is easy, but what if you have to find out empirically which one(s) you actually need. You spend a lot of time doing boring work that's more or less the stuff in the ARRL handbook, but also knowing that you're going to need two signals, one ~ 60 times the frequency of the other, and in ratios "We don't know yet". At least.

To the extent I've been able to test any of this...yup, it's likely possible this is going to work. But there's more to it than plugging in a new coil form in a linear amplifier, while controlling for a ton of other variables....and learning some other new things, like just how variable at a given pressure the ratio of ions to neutrals (And other species like diatoms with and without charge) is. One may think you get a fairly reasonable and predictable ratio there given an amount of power you spend on ionizing things and a particular set of conditions. Nope - there is (at least) bi-stable behavior - with otherwise all completely identical conditions....

Shouldn't be a surprise, really, if this was easy I would have been beaten to the punch long since...and I am having fun finding out things "we all thought we knew" were wrong, and finding out why we were wrong - this is all about having fun learning after all, while we hope something good pops out at the end.

But it makes for lousy writing - I kind of doubt everyone wants to see huge amounts of documentation on "strange RF generator design and implementation" - just the final one that does the right thing - when we find out what that is. It's not hopeless, just hard and slow sometimes.
For me...I use youtube a lot to make reporting things of some little interest easier for myself, then for the real explanations for the real audience, put those words here linked to the video. Saves me from the BS Tl;Dr crowed on youtube while getting to use their bits and servers for free...and then people here who have a clue can get the real details. Without too much of that 99% perspiration...there's always gonna be some, but...

Examples:
https://youtu.be/fQYqOsk5QRo

https://youtu.be/EH09hTO3Yx8

But the real things all link from the forums:
http://coultersmithing.com/forums/viewt ... 6441#p6441