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Not your average charger!


ante

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Hi Ante,
That's a unique way to use an ignition system in reverse, complete with a functioning sparkplug.
It may be necessary to connect the battery through a full-wave rectifier, because I think that the antenna will pickup a lot of RF, and the polarity of the static charge may depend on "which way the wind blows".
You could say that a positive wind attracts and carries the electrons from the antenna, leaving it positive. But the wind could instead be negative at times and "dump" some of its extra electrons onto the antenna, leaving it negative.
I think that the "charging current" will be very infrequent, short high current pulses.

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Hi GPG,
The author doesn't report charging a deep discharge (car?) battery, but just replenishing (trickle plus a bit more) the charge that was taken by a transistor (and tube, but what about the filiaments?) radio.
But he has it hooked up (his words) wrong. He has the entire coil in series with the battery. If he connected the coil's high-voltage terminal to the antenna and sparkplug, then connected the lowest terminal of the coil and the threads of the sparkplug to earth-ground, the entire high-voltage winding will be energized for each spark. The coil's tap will produce a high-current short pulse and the battery can be connected to it and to earth-ground through an added full-wave rectifier.
The sparkplug may need a larger gap than is normal.
Don't use his 1-3KV capacitor across the sparkplug, because there will be about 20KV or more there.
Use a lighning arrestor for the antenna with a gap just a lbit larger than the sparkplug.
Experiment with a "condenser" across the low-voltage winding.
I think that it will work, but will depend on the environment.

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Man!! Did I ever get this one wrong.
Of course, the sparkplug's high-voltage terminal must be connected to the antenna, and nothing else. Then the sparkplug's threads must be connected to the high-voltage terminal of the coil, and nothing else. The sparkplug is in series with the coil.
So when the charge on the antenna is high enough, it causes the sparkplug to fire and the current travels through the entire coil to ground. The magnetic field of the coil induces a high current pulse in its low-voltage winding which is fed through the full-wave rectifier to the battery.

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