We'll see, I did it at any rate. Tied all the tubes in the table frame together (drilled and tapped holes...) as well as the pull out keyboard tray - a pretty big piece of isolated metal mounted under-table and where I noticed the backlights on the keyboard coming on during a lower power test...It's a mess, but I'm working there because heating more than one building at all times is too much for me..."Spring is on the way". But for now, I'm working here, right next to the heater.
- Messy space with tons of uP's and semis to fry laying around...
Gee, I hope you can't hear me, but maybe we should do a test on purpose when I get to that point. Normally you can't radiate this stuff that well without a long antenna...but when we step it up to insane volts, well, maybe there's some conductor with some current in it to radiate with. I've seen things as silly as bumper mount 160m antennas that worked according to their users - at one frequency (super high Q loaded). Similar situation here till I can get it all back inside my faraday cage, just a shorter whip.
And hopefully I land somewhere in this band or even a bit lower - if I jam the AM band talk shows a little, so be it. That's still up in the air as I measure and try to find a place where the voltages I can generate move the particles enough to cycle through the grid and out to a decent radius.
Going lower in frequency seems to compensate somewhat for the fact that the ions don't see the field we think we're putting on there - some of it they neutralize, more or less. So at a lower F they have more time to move, since they're going slower than the simple math would predict. On the flip side, I don't want slower, I want faster, generally speaking as I want them to be coming in fast enough to fuse if they do hit. A whole lot of balls in the air for this tradeoff, and the math seems to be ill defined at best - all I have is a direction, not a slope (or even a shape, I'm using an assumption of a line for the moment). The math I'm using now - which did hit it on the head at my low pressure limit or very close - small perturbations around those numbers just made it worse - doesn't account for inter ion interactions, and things get lousy quick with pressure going up to the range we'd rather run in - I think, as a bit higher pressure is where the DC Q is highest.
Which is itself an assumption. So what's really going on is "test some stuff and adapt based on what I learn". That sweep tube amp could probablty have been somewhat tweaked - it was close to enough running well below what it should have been able to do, but at the limit of what it DID do - around 160w output.
This guy should be loafing by comparison - and can hit class C instead of B, but of course I still need to do some serious protection (of the screens) around what would happen in the main plate supply isn't working, and in fact, just building a decent main plate supply in the first place - that's most of what's on my plate now. Somehow I don't think that just powering down the screen supply when the main supply is powered down is enough. What if it is powered up, but fails or is somehow disconnected? I've seen those failure modes in other things. So, a little skull sweat to be applied...
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.