> news.com takes it seriously....=20
> http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-5079564.html
The concept is sound, but the news.com.com report is shallow enough to =
be
baloney. The concept of radiating power in this manner is not new. The
"antenna" is, I would guess, an inefficient high-frequency transformer =
with
a carefully-designed air gap. I did some design work many years ago =
with
respect to storing energy that could be retrieved when the field =
collapsed.
We built an efficient power supply for a new type of movie theater lamp. =
At
the time, the competing products had to be lifted into place by crane,
whereas ours could be delivered by one person. Our downside was that the
failure mode was inappropriate: it was "fail stupidly dangerous", in =
that if
power was lost there was a huge amount of stored energy just waiting to
re-saturate any ferromagnetic cores and PCB traces that weren't totally
straight in the next 1/400th seconds.
But, we did notice that extremely simple headphone-like equipment (if =
you
remember that telephone handsets used to consist of a capsule of
loosely-packed granules) gave us a very good indication of how well the
device was operating at that time, and at a substantial range. Mind you,
people with bad fillings and scraps of foil from chocolate bars embedded =
in
their teeth were equally accurate guides.
So I'd guess this is an analog rather than a digital transmission =
medium.
You can do a lot with a 0.4mm gap in a high-frequency transformer.
Received on Sat Sep 20 18:26:40 2003