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From: John_Richard_Bruni@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: When I Found Out, I Was Shocked!
Message-ID: <16733@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 6 Feb 91 23:30:27 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 97, Message 7 of 10


Hi Patrick,

I see from your postscript to my letter that you shared some
electrifying experiences with me ... I got zapped by plate voltage a
few times while hamming, thank God not on a linear amp.  The best zap
I ever got was off a power supply I made for a linear accelerator in
high school.  This was basically a Tesla coil, but the primary was
tuned and drew about .15 amps at 12,000 volts.  I was playing with it
one day using a four foot florescent tube attached to the proverbial
ten foot pole.  A lightning bolt traveled down the tube, down the
pole, down the *outside* of my arm and under all my clothes where it
went to ground through the safety kicker switch I was standing on.

The only place I got shocked was where the bolt went through my toe.
It left a little black pinhole in my big toenail.  Oh, and when this
happened I got thrown off the kicker switch, which shut down the coil
just before I hit it.  I got a second shock from the large static
electric field that the secondary coil always built up after a minute
or so of operation.

This tall but true tail has nothing to do with Telecom, I present it
here for your amusement.  The coil was designed, BTW, to put out 2.5
MEV of tuned power to a linear accelerator tube, unrectified.  The
tube was short enough that AC merely made it put out a beam from each
end.  Vacuum problems put the fini to this project, as well as
radiation concerns from the people granting me money to build it.  I`d
guess that of the 2.5 MEV I was shooting for, 1.5 of it vanished in
solid blue corona.  The device built up enough ozone in the room it
was being tested in to give one a severe headache in only a minute or
two of operation, and lit florescent bulbs in several houses nearby.
TVI and RFI were problematic as well.


John_Bruni@CUP.PORTAL.COM