Re: C of Earth...

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Terry Fritz" <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>

Hi Jim and All,

Seeing How Tesla was sort of desperate to get the energy transmission thing
to work, I have been thinking of ways to help out ;-))

Assuming unlimited money and the use of modern materials and going off the
real basis for Tesla's power transmission idea:

http://hot-streamer-dot-com/TeslaCoils/OtherPapers/TeslaPatents/us000645576.pdf 

I was wondering what it would take to get the darn thing working...  

If I have a transmitting and receiving station 100 miles apart, a 6 meter
wide copper sheet stretched between the two stations to solve the ground
problem (hey, I can cheat a little ;-)), two big 100 foot diameter
metalized balloons reaching to the ionosphere and electrically tethered
back to the stations...  There is a fundamental problem.  What is the
conductivity of the ionosphere between the two balloons for the stations.
One could probably get say 20 MV up there but if the ionosphere is not
going to conduct well the losses are going to kill it despite whatever else
one does.  I assume lightning and other obvious problems are not worth
worrying with until this fundamental problem is analyzed.  

I found a chart at:

http://jupiter.agu-dot-org/epubs/jgr_space/ja9905/1999JA900056/f04.html

Which implies that the conductivity of the ionosphere is fairly good for a
very high voltage low current system.  However it does not give the units
well unless it is saying 100 ohm/m^3 as a volume resistivity???  This is a
pretty important number to know to within a few orders of magnitude.  If
the resistance is too high, we are just going to make pretty lights in the sky.

I can just see the thing making on ionized path between the two stations as
in the picture at:

http://www.oma.be/BIRA-IASB/Scientific/Topics/SpacePhysics/Aurora.html

Although pretty, this would just be a waste of power for our system and
would irritate the locals under it.

If the resistance is not too high and the electrical path does not ionize
too wastefully, then one could start worrying about "tuning" something with
a 100 mile streamer running a city at the other end.  But Bill's friends
are working that out...  Possibly, a far more difficult hurdle to
overcome...  Of course, DC may work fine too but that would sort of spoil
the whole idea.

I note that Tesla's Colorado Springs system did not seem terribly efficient
but maybe it just needs a little fixing:

http://hot-streamer-dot-com/temp/bulbs.jpg

200 watts of bulbs at 100 feet from a 30kW transmitter with 2500 square
feet of receiving antenna is obviously not going to sell :-))  Probably a
bad example...

I don't mean to prolong this thread that always seems to go on too long,
but maybe we can find a way for it to at least sort of work a little even
though it is not practical to do.  That would help Tesla's memory out if at
least there were a reasonable way the system "could" have worked a little
bit.  Then we could say it is too expensive and "messy" instead of it is
impossible.

Cheers,

	Terry




At 07:03 AM 5/7/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>Isolated sphere capacitance is 114 pf/meter radius.  Earth is roughly 6750
>km radius, so 6.75E6*114E-12 = 769E-6 F, awfully close to the quoted 800 uF.
>
>Of course, you can also consider the gap between the surface of the earth
>and the somewhat conductive ionosphere as a cavity resonator, which like all
>cavities, has several modes (transverse, longitudinal, etc.)
>
>You'd also need to consider that it's a pretty leaky capacitor.
>