As a rough test it’s definitely not flashy, but it’s my first successful attempt to drive a Tesla coil with an external oscillator (HAM radio), and the first successful test with a grid bias board I had designed last month.

See, most vacuum tube Tesla coils are usually armstrong oscillators that resonate against their own magnetic field. It is a simple, efficient, and reliable design, but lacks precision and control.

IE: you can only drive it at one frequency (unless something went horribly right/wrong).

With this method you can drive it at any frequency you wish, or with crazy things like triangle or sawtooth waves (which are suspected to get some novel results in an actual Tesla setup.)

Spincter clench 11 as a lot of work and equipment was all in one places, definitely a lot of tiptoeing trying to bring the power up.

I ended up with about 10 watts in from the radio and about 200 watts out into the coil.

The more important part is that it confirmed the bias boards I designed+soldered work properly, which means I can start getting them integrated to the 1500w tube amplifier I had been working on. It’ll run on a pair of microwave oven transformers at around 3kv.

Then if that works I have a couple soviet surplus tubes from Ukraine that are rated 3.5kw that will need at least 4 microwave transformers to get the full potential (some pun intended).😊

It’s gonna be a fun month🤠😈