I am interested in hooking a fluorescent tube up to my CB radio to see how it functions as a transmitting antenna.
Is this safe (for the transmitter)? Perhaps some kind of matching network is needed. if so,please explain how.
Also ... to be effective, does the tube need to be quarter wavelength as in a dipole, or is tuning less critical due to properties of the plasma.
Regards,
Mark Simmons
It will absorb the rf, not radiate it. Forget about trying that.
Hmm, doesn't thermodynamics have something to say about this? If not, I think you've found the solution to that messy "energy problem".
Fluorescent tubes are highly nonlinear, so in addition to turning a lot of your nice RF into light it'll also generate all sorts of nasty distortion products, with accompanying harmonic radiation.
Fluourescent CB antennas? Wasteful, Idiotic, Rediculous: the perfect product for the trucker market!
Luhan
Play around with a small neon lamp, I used one to adjust the last stages of a transmittor,inductive with a
1.5 winding attatched, capacitive with 1 inch or less wires attatched. When you move it far enough away from the arial, it can be a quite sensitive (uncalibrated) power indicator, without influencing your arial to much.
I don't know if this can work.
It seems like what you would want to do is get the plasma going, in the normal fashion, then couple the CB energy in using some kind of high-pass or band-pass.
I'm just thinking off the top of my head here.
Let us know how it goes.
--Mac
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