Tesla Three-it lives

eeeeee....

This is the official first light. I'm waving a ground rod near the breakout point to attract the arc, which is about 7.5" long here. It's running somewhere between 800 and 1000bps and makes a real gnarly screeching noise. Without the ground rod nearby, the streamer formation is none too impressive, maybe it's time for a smaller topload? What the hell! It works!

The movie that this still came from (QuickTime .MOV 14 seconds 2.5MB)

bbrraakkk!!!
Here it's running at 1200bps but on half-wave unfiltered supply. The streamers look pretty cool but are very dim so I had to use a 5 second exposure. The biggest spark under these conditions is 8.5". If you look closely at the bottom of the coil, you can see corona forming on the leads of the primary caps... That's not good!

Where did I put my earplugs?

This is a 1-second burst of 1200bps on filtered DC. It struck the ground point at 9".

Exterminate!

Here is a quick burst, same as above, but probably about 0.3 second. The ground point was removed, this is just going into the air. It looks similar to discharges I've seen from big SSTCs running off halfwave rectified supply.

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