I did not explain myself very well above. First, I need clean power. Then I would create a sinewave and put it through the detector. The resultant information will now be riding on top of the sine wave. On the other side of the detector, I put the total wave form through a circuit that has the inverted sinewave. The result would be the information picked up by the detector / capacitor. It should be nice and clean. Obviously, I cant use DC. Obviously, the sinewave plus the signal would look like a bunch of garbage.
It would seem logical that a flat plate cap might make it more directional?! The larger and flatter the plate - the more side rejection there would be. This has to be true. In fact, if I remember my earlier years, you could "mix" in variable levels of the inverted output of extra channel "non-flatplate" cap detectors to further eliminate unwanted signals from the sides. The Earth would be the "back-plane". Kind of like a high gain directional detector with infinate rear rejection and high side rejection. (The radiation pattern of a stacked rombic comes to mind). I am talking way out of my field here.
A friend of mine with the University of South Carolina emailed me last night saying I could use his A to D and computer the weekend before the fourth of July. It would be a long drive but I could test this stuff out if I can build a circuit soon enough. I am a Florida Gator living in Georgia (Athens), so it would mean driving into hostile territory!
Another friend of mine built some large caps. He) used carbon dust electrostaticly deposited onto the dialetric, then layered. I'll have to think about that. Anybody build a flat plate cap before?
Andy
