Is it sinking in yet?
Honestly, I feel like I've been kicked in the stomach. I feel really badly about this.
Poynt99 asked me what the capacitance of my TBF coil was, by the method of disconnecting the series connection and measuring across the two half-coils with the capacitance meter. The capacitance measured that way is 2.19 nF.
So he came back with the suggestion to substitute a capacitor for the PBT coil in my test setup. I asked him to make it explicit by posting a schematic, so we all know we are on the same page. So he did that, and specified a capacitor value of 2.2 nF, a standard value. I found one in my parts stash, a good quality poly film unit.
I turned on the scope and let it and the Interstate F43 FG warm up. Both instruments were still set up from last night, so I didn't even change any settings except FG output amplitude (which I always turn down low when it's not in use.) I connected up the parts and hooked them up, with the new FG coupling toroid I described above. And Bingo. All I did was turn up the FG amplitude to get a good vertical height for the signals, and tweak the frequency a bit to get full waveforms on the screen.
Saved the screenshot and the data dump and posted them here. And I wanted someone else to run the calculations before I told the story. Partzman kindly scrutinized the scopeshots and ran the numbers, and got the same result I got.
What's the moral of this little story? Well, either I've got an overunity 35 cent capacitor on my bench.... or it makes it absolutely imperative for Partzman and the rest of us to try to find some _other_ indication of power levels, independently of oscilloscope measurements and 'traditional' power calculations, if this project is to survive. Of course, the scope is still necessary, obviously for tuning purposes, so that the _measurements_ indicate COP >1, but the scope traces and measurements alone cannot be used as evidence for OU any more. Unless, of course, you are prepared to accept that my tiny poly film cap is also an OU device when connected in series with a couple of resistors.
So I think talk of self-looping is still very premature. It's good to have suggestions as to how it might be done, but until a COP>1 is actually confirmed by something other than scope measurements, there isn't much to work with. How do you test a self-looping system for an OU device if the test device isn't actually OU?
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