Oznog
Active Member
I have 100KV high tension lines over the rear of my very long plot, about 250 ft from my house. It's very dark back there.
Lemme get something out of the way. I KNOW that you cannot "steal" any significant amount of power by putting a pickup coil under high tension lines. The story about a farmer making a coil and powering his shed from "unbalanced" power lines is an urban legend. There are a bunch of these stories and they're all urban legends. Nothing you can do will drain more than the faint power than it normally radiates out.
BUT, a simple experiment shows that a fluorescent tube glows very faintly. Far more significant still, an LED glows faintly but still far more intensely and in a more noticeable fashion! The sheer novelty of this has me fascinated.
I took electromagnetics and antenna design YEARS ago. And I certainly don't recall 60Hz antennas being in the textbook. Is anybody more current on antenna design knowledge? 'cause I'm wondering what the most effective pickup would be. The tallest, I suppose, or do we need to have a high pickup then a shielded wire to make the greatest differential to ground? The lines are quite high up there, even a 10 ft pole isn't going to be a safety hazard. I could do a stick of bamboo tied to a fence pole, 10 ft's about the best you could hope for without guy wires. Wind and all.
I already figured out that we need two LEDs in parallel but opposite directions to properly exploit it, since each LED only uses the current in one direction and it's picking up AC. Now, how many LED pairs can be driven in series? I wanna see it bad...
Lemme get something out of the way. I KNOW that you cannot "steal" any significant amount of power by putting a pickup coil under high tension lines. The story about a farmer making a coil and powering his shed from "unbalanced" power lines is an urban legend. There are a bunch of these stories and they're all urban legends. Nothing you can do will drain more than the faint power than it normally radiates out.
BUT, a simple experiment shows that a fluorescent tube glows very faintly. Far more significant still, an LED glows faintly but still far more intensely and in a more noticeable fashion! The sheer novelty of this has me fascinated.
I took electromagnetics and antenna design YEARS ago. And I certainly don't recall 60Hz antennas being in the textbook. Is anybody more current on antenna design knowledge? 'cause I'm wondering what the most effective pickup would be. The tallest, I suppose, or do we need to have a high pickup then a shielded wire to make the greatest differential to ground? The lines are quite high up there, even a 10 ft pole isn't going to be a safety hazard. I could do a stick of bamboo tied to a fence pole, 10 ft's about the best you could hope for without guy wires. Wind and all.
I already figured out that we need two LEDs in parallel but opposite directions to properly exploit it, since each LED only uses the current in one direction and it's picking up AC. Now, how many LED pairs can be driven in series? I wanna see it bad...
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