Thoughts on Building the ultimate Tesla Coil

These notes will not worry about the size of the arks but about Resonance, High Q,  And Antenna Concepts.

For these thoughts I will be considering the classic  Bottom Primary and Tower Secondary coil design.


1)  Pick a frequency you want to use, say somewhere between 100Khz and 1 Mhz. to me this would be based on what portable AM Radio Receiver's frequency bands I owned.

2) Lets say 1 Mhz to make things easy.

3) calculate the wavelength of that frequency. We will be using 1/4 wavelength for length of secondary winding.

4) Pick a wire gage for secondary you can get spool of. Lets say 28 gauge for now.

5) Calculate the weight of windings wire. (Ok weight a foot or two of it and multiply.

6) Some Say Tesla felt primary and secondary wire weight should be equal.

 7) calculate secondary wire lengths total surface area, some say its the surface areas that should match.

8) Pick a height to diameter ratio for core. H= 2XD seems good to give coils highest Q.
Must add more here.

9) Now we get tricky.     As we want a resonant frequency of X (1 Mhz) and Wire length of 1/4 wavelength of this. We must adjust self capacitance and  coils inductance to get there by adjusting the dielectric of the  coil's form with its enter winding spacing and the size of coil form to get there.

10) Assuming we have gotten the best match. we can test secondary by its self for resonate frequency.
Sweep generator, frequency counter and oscilloscope would be nice but I expect a radio and sparking a simple say 9 V battery across it would work, keeping in mind it would be unmodulated RF pulses we would be listening for.

11) Now Primary Coil. Is there any weight and surface area we can find for primary's length secondary winding ?

12) And any even or old submultiple of secondary's resonant frequency wavelength we can find while keeping in mind it needs (Maybe, maybe not) to have a inter winding diameter greater than secondary coil.

13) having made best match possible of above, now calulate or measure primary coil's inductance to determine what value capacatance needed for parellel L-C circuit to  resonate at secondaries resonate frequency.


I will try and flesh out these thoughts with references and formulates as I get time.

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