Hi, I have been playing around with a Tesla circuit. It's the one where you draw power from the air, using antenna and ground connections. (I'm sure some of you know it) I'm only pulling about 7vdc at the moment but I expect to bump that up with a better antenna and grounding. I've seen other people pulling over 100vdc given the correct environment. The only trouble is amperage....It's in the micro-amp range. I can't give an exact value as I don't have a micrometer, but I know it's low. My question is, does anyone know how to boost micro-amps to milliamps and then the holy grail...Amps. I am looking into Darlington transistor arrays but I am scratching my head as to how to apply them. Tks in advance.

 

"Let there be lightning!"

 

It's all about power (watts). You can get more micro amps, but at a lower voltage. P=IE

 

Even if a conversion circuit were possible, it wouldn't yield anything useful. You said your current is in the "micro-amp range." Assuming 5 uA at 7 V, that's 35 microwatts, or 35 uW. A single little green LED takes 1200 times more power than that, and that's not counting power losses in whatever conversion circuit is used.

As noted above, power equals voltage times current. Even if you had a 99.9% efficient converter to boost your output current from 5 uA to 1A, the output voltage would be only 35 microvolts.

ak

 

Did you design your coils to have a tunable resonance point that is very close to a frequency of a local radio or TV station?

Power receiving tesla coils are not much more than a large radio tuning coil so they have to be turned to a specific frequency that has enough power to do something in order to work.

If you have a large AM radio station near by that's the frequency you want to shoot for!

 

Thanks AnalogKid, that's kind of what I thought. Interestingly, I am tapping this voltage from a rotating electo-magnetic field (which I build to rotate at 2800 rpm). I have a large copper coil sitting in the middle of the EMF and this is what the 'antenna' is connected to. I wasn't aware that a voltage could drawn in this way, so I found that interesting but my micro amps seems to be unusable current. I'm told I can fit a Joule Thief with a pot that can make an led pulse which is just the caps discharging but current is everything. I may have wasted my time but I had fun doing it

 

If it was possible I think Tesla would have figured it out already..