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/fQYqOsk5QRohttps://youtu.be/EH09hTO3Yx8 But the real things all link from the forums:
http://coultersmithing.com/forums/viewt ... 6441#p6441
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.