Modeling Secondary Inductance

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

Original poster: "Janet Johnson by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <jpjmassage-at-earthlink-dot-net>

Hi everyone,
I was using WinTesla to design my coil and started playing with the Spice model
provided.  A book I have (The Tesla Coil Book by Brent Turner) describes the
secondary as a series resonant ckt but the Spice model from WinTesla shows the
self capacitance plus the toroid cap in parallel.  This makes sense to me since
self-capacitance comes from inter-winding and planar, both of which are in
parallel with the coil inductance.  Is the book wrong or am I missing
something?  Another point of confusion for me is how the secondary is treated
both as a quarter-wave resonator and an LC resonator.  The first is a
transmission line concept (i.e. distributed inductance and capacitance) while
the second is a lumped element concept.  Is this like wave/particle duality of
light or something?  
Something else I noticed about the model was that when the spark gap switch
closed, the coil output spiked up and rang down.  I thought the secondary
oscillations built over successive firings until the voltage reached a
threshold and blasted out sparks.  I read an analogy with lasers somewhere...
Anyway, if some of you theoriticians out there wouldn't mind setting me
straight on the concepts, I would be most grateful.  I am an engineer so I
can't help having to know exactly how these things work!
Thanks in advance
 
Jeff Johnson
Salt Lake City