On 10/20/2010 03:04 PM, Owen Duffy wrote:
Mike wrote in news:i9n3jq$ds62$1
@tr22n12.aset.psu.edu:

...
So to return to my real world example, an air core solenoid used as a
tuning coil for a bugcatcher antenna, would I be wanting to short the
unused portions of the coil, or leave them unshorted?

Seems that unshorted would be bad.

I wrote some notes based on a simple model of an air cored single layer
solenoid, they are at
http://www.vk1od.net/tx/concept/TappedCoil/index.htm .

The model suggests that shorting the unused turns is a poorer solution
when the flux coupling factor is relatively high, and a very small number
of turns are shorted. Poorer both because of loss and the granularity of
L adjustment.

In that situation, the voltage induced in open unused turns is not very
high, whereas it can be extreme in cases where most of the turns are
unused.

So, a combination of methods may be optimimum, depending on the flux
coupling factor, voltage withstand, granularity of variation of L, etc.

Owen

Thank you very much for the explanation.

Another interesting and very practical graph would be: for a 20 turn,
50mm diameter and various winding pitches coil, how much additional
energy loss, 1, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 additional short circuited turns add.


--
Alejandro Lieber LU1FCR
Rosario Argentina

Real-Time F2-Layer Critical Frequency Map foF2:
http://1fcr.com.ar