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@@neil6958 I'm in the UK and despite my other comment, yours was interesting as we in London have had more power outages in recent times and two in the last couple of days..
I have a suspicion that when snow falls off of a wire it can leave a charge behind because the charge spreads to the outside of a conductor. Thus most of the (prob negative) charge would go with the lumps of snow that the wind shakes off.
I get a series of zaps while vacuuming ash from my pellet stove...Sparks jump to my hand thru the plastic hose as the dry ash particles flow. There is likely an AC component of pulses building the charge induced on your antenna. That explains a potential across the inductor in your radio's front end....
Very interesting phenomenon. Here's my analysis of it. The first clue is that you got an arc to the chassis despite the 36 ohm coil to ground. That means that the arc must have been caused by a spike of current, as that is the only condition where the coil is high impedance. So what I think happened is this: static built up on the aerial from the wind. This slowly charged the X1 capacitor. At this point the chassis and the arc point are at the same potential, while the aerial is charged to however many kV. When the capacitor is sufficiently charged, an arc happens. This is not the arc in the receiver, but a big arc between the two sides of the aerial. As a path opens to ground, the X1 capacitor starts to quickly discharge. However, due to the high impedance of the coil, the current discharging the capacitor must find another way. And within microseconds, the potential over the chassis rises enough to create the arc that you witnessed. So the final discharge loop is: one side of the X1 capacitor --- the coax --- one side of the aerial --- arc --- the grounded side of the aerial --- electrical wiring --- probably another arc in the isolation transformer --- the chassis --- the arc in the receiver --- the other side of the X1 capacitor. This would also have enough loop area to create the strangeness in the speakers. And for maximum youtuber collaboration awesomeness, may I suggest that you send the broken LED lamp to Big Clive?
@@wolfiexii Of course you could. It wouldn't be very efficient by any means but if all you wanted was to see sparks over a spark gap, why not... The mystery in this case though is not how snow could create static electricity (that's pretty obvious) but the exact mechanism of how everything in the circuit finally produced an arc to the chassis despite the 36 ohm coil in parallel.
@@wolfiexii you're forgetting the coax creates a capacitor that can shape pulses all on its own. I'm guessing the coax and antenna charge up, discharge happens outside and the pulse is large and fast enough that it blows through anything between it and earth.
I'm a broadcast Engineer who specializes in maintaining AM arrays. We were hooking up a new tower in an older 4 tower array and there was an electrical storm approaching. one of the guys with me touched the tower and got a healthy shock from it! (the transmitter was off). We measured about 120 volts AC across the base insulator! Since then we use a jumper cable to ground the tower and make it more safe. Also don't play with a 285 foot lightening rod with electrical storms around!
Was the snow the dry, powdery kind? If so, your antenna rig created a charge-separation accumulator. The atmospheric voltage gradient between ground and your antenna can be several kilovolts. In dry conditions, each flake of snow forms a tiny capacitor and picks up a charge when high in the atmosphere. As these flakes pass by the antenna elements, they dump their charge. Any insulation or resistance would allow the charge to build up in the antenna until breakdown is achieved. In a similar vein, I worked for a blimp company many years ago. We had grounding chains hanging from the envelope to ground the static charges that would build up during flight. Because the envelope was basically a giant capacitor (made of polyester), lethal voltages could accumulate during dry weather. The last thing you wanted your ground crew to do was touch the metal handrails of the gondola before the chains hit the ground!
Uh huh. I've encountered this a couple times. It's not uncommon for wind to build up very high static charges on antenna towers and similar structures, especially if they're isolated from earth. It's more rare to see that with snow but it certainly happens. Yeah, a very long dipole could easily get thousands of volts built up on it as flakes pass by or land on it. Once at a TV station with a thunderstorm approaching, it was not yet storming, the 500 foot tower was well grounded, as were the guy wire tie points, yet there were periodic arcs from the lower wires to ground from about 20 feet above ground. Yes, very long arcs. They only last for a moment. Which brings up another thing, these static discharges, and lightning and related, occur very very fast exhibiting a very high frequency. That safety cap was likely undamaged because it passed the arc easily. Being such high frequency the cap looks like a short. Since it happens only periodically and so quickly nothing heats up, nothing gets damaged. Solid state devices however could certainly die in that very short time.
I get a series of zaps while vacuuming ash from my pellet stove...Sparks jump to my hand thru the plastic hose as the dry ash particles flow. There is likely an AC component of pulses building the charge induced on your antenna. That explains a potential across the inductor in your radio's front end....
you can be shocked by dry pine trees when it's very dry out if the snow is just a cone on the tips of the needles... I've been hit dozens of times by the effect. Ice has many forms and snowflakes change with electrostatic charges
Excellent video mystery! RF Antenna engineer here. You built a Tesla coil! My thought is that you have an open circuit transmission line that is of a 1/4 wavelength multiple. What freq was the radio tuned to. Did you change it without effect? The dielectric strength of air at RF is 15kV/inch. You have at least 2KV at that arc. Easy to get voltage step-ups of 5 to 10 times with a transmission resonant transmission line in a partially connected radio. It's how a Tesla coil really works. His secondary was a critically coupled slow wave 1/4 wavelength open circuit transmission line resonator. At Co. Springs the resonant freq was just below 100kHz and about 95% efficient at Co. Springs in 1899. Keep em glowing but not arcing!
Annnnnnd...isn't it also the case that it doesn't harm your radio equipment? Even though it's all solid state gear these days? I mean, if I take Carlson's fearful comments at face value, one would expect electronic equipment damage aboard aircraft whenever this phenomena occurs; esp. the radios. But, (normally? generally?) it doesn't happen! Planes get where they're going fine, despite flying thru wild fields of static potential up there. I'm not yet convinced it wasn't simply because he had his lab+rig+antenna system connected in some unfavorable way somehow.
Andrew Skretvedt Quite the contrary. Aircraft are very different. We aren’t properly grounded. We have static wicks on trailing edges to help dissipate static electricity. In my experience, I’ve had avionics damaged from static. I am not as familiar with the isolation techniques used in avionics, but it’s kind of a different game from radios here on the ground, something I’m much more familiar with. Static can and does damage avionics. That’s why we have backups for backups.
@@atsdroid I replaced about 200 IP phones at one place in Reno, they all died from call center agents plugging in their headsets after walking inside each morning. Electromigration is a thing, it becomes more of an issue as junctions become smaller. If that arc kept going forever on the tube radio, eventually it would eat a hole in the chassis. It's a lot easier to burn a hole in a silicon die where junctions are the size of a few atoms. Eventually the phone was redesigned to improve decoupling at the headset port, but that same tiny shock applied to any other part of the board would still probably kill it. It's impossible to isolate everything, at such tiny scales. This is basic physics, not "fearful comments". It's a huge multi trillion dollar ongoing challenge in aerospace. A single charged particle can break 1000s of electrons loose, and it can be hard to predict where they go. Real world testing and revisions are required. This is why the radiation hardened parts used on aircraft lag several generations behind modern technology, on top of the larger processes being less susceptible to radiation damage in the first place
I have heard of this happening several times from HAM radio friends who had long wire receiving antenna's (REALLY LONG WIRES for ELF and VLF frequencies) seeing ARCS and in one instance getting physically shocked! This incident was recalled by a famous radio show host in the U.S.A. whose name was Art Bell who hosted the "Coast to Coast" radio show on late night, Art recalled this event on one of his show's a few decades ago!! Art has been a "Silent Key" now for quite a few years!! Yea dry snow with wind behind it could really generate some high voltages on a long wire!! John Bellas KC2UVN 73's Interesting to see this happening! Thanks for the video!! Just before any storms with or without wind, I always disconnect antenna feeds with a switching system that disconnects all my equipment of any antenna's and grounds them out even though they have static suppressors inline on the coax as well as lightning protection outside the house!!
Question I would have, would this be a potential for a fire while someone was away and not making the disconnects that would be required? I'm guessing yes.
@@jdmccorful that's why you can buy a static discharge arrestor... which attaches to the coax from the antenna. It grounds (discharges) the electrical charges. Useful to have.
I would be interested to see if you find any issue with your isolation transformer in lab 2, especially since I have the same one. I also would love to see a video entirely on safety capacitors, how to tell if you need them and where to put them in old radios, as well as determining proper capacitance for them. This arc'ing issue you've seen seems to play right into that.
When I was Active Duty in the Marines we would see similar instances of static charges building up and discharging in our High Frequency Aircraft radios when it snowed or stormed real bad. Especially prevalent on the ARC-94 HF transceivers and they’d knock you into the next room of you were forgetful and left the grounding clamps off them. It must have been coming down hard to be jumping an air gap that big. Super glad you caught that and shared it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it
Hi I really enjoy Watching your videos... Here is a hypothesis on the effects you are seeing... As the snow strikes the antenna a static charge is built up and passes down the antenna, as the chassis is not grounded charge builds up on the entire chassis of the radio until it reaches the brake down voltage required to overcome the insulation of the isolation transformer, when this arc occurs not only is the charge on the chassis of the radio sent to ground but all the charge on the antenna which must pass through the aforementioned 30ish ohm coil as the current spike passes through the coil it generates a massive magnetic field which then collapses creating a very high voltage spike across the coil causing the arc observed ( essentially the coil is both a primary and secondary all in one. In this case earth is one plate of a capacitor and the antenna is the other.
I'm still amazed at all this. At 64 I am trying to learn enough about electronics to restore my old Zenith Trans-Oceanic H500. After six months of reading watching and doing my best to absorb, I feel confident enough to really screw things up. I'm still forging ahead and will eventually reach a sub-novice level and maybe be able to test and replace caps, diodes, resistors, that time bomb known as the selenium rectifier, align the bands, and eventually enjoy. All you guys really do amaze me.
When I was a kid in the 1980's I once built a project that did this with dripping water through 2 rings. Over time (sometimes took a few minutes depending on humidity) it jumped across a 3mm needle gap, so a few kV at least (didn't have HV meter at the time). Pretty inefficient compared to a Van de Graaff generator, but never wore out since the only moving part is water. Looks like there's some capacitance getting discharged in that arc, so it bites a bit harder than a doorknob and feet rubbing on a carpet. I sure wouldn't want to try it with 10 Joule or more worth (ie 3000v and 2.2uF), good chance of getting killed. Even 0.5J (250kV 14pF from a VDG) hurts quite a bit. I've never seen it happen with snow, but I guess whether the water is frozen or not doesn't matter much as far as physics is concerned.
the 14pF at 250kV might have only 0.5J, but will push a LOT of current because of the really high voltage (this is why it hurts a lot). Personally I'd rather take my chances with the 250kV as the pulse will be much sharper and shorter then with a 2.2uF at 3kV...longer pulse = greater chance of stopping the heart, not sure if skin effect comes into play with these discharges as well.
@@ancapftw9113 Speaking of an electric fence. Well I used to stay on a farm. The the pigs kept escaping through the fence. Just friends rails on posts. Wood. They've squeezed right through. We had an old battery powered electric fence charger the type it would run off like a 12 volt battery. So we decided to put up an electric fence. We were installing the insulators and wire on the fence. On metal post. Sharon T post. The battery was disconnected but one lead was still connected to either the positive or negative from a 12-volt battery. I was putting the wire on an insulator. I don't remember if I was touching the post at the time or not or do I get to my feet I was wearing shoes at the time of course. I think it was like four or four and a half kill volt electric fence hard to say. But the wire got bumped and brushed against the positive or negative the one that wasn't connected at the time. long enough to to activate fence controller. I jumped like a mile. Remember that one time Weaver setting the pigs off the slaughter. And a hand a hot shot cattle prod. One of the pigs went underneath the guy's leg he lost his balance. and happening get when the other guys is that was helping us. to his rear end on his back. business shirt happened to be to the side. and when he was falling because the Pig going between his legs. he happened to pull the trigger on the cattle prod. the other guy got the full brunt of the of the cattle prod. Needless to say there is another person that well Roundup well... up getting Zapped afterwards.
@@AKAtheA Skin effect on human skin is mostly a myth. It's really only significant with good conductors (metals). With a human being the conductor RF and short-pulse currents actually prefer blood vessels and nerves (higher conductivity once the skin is burned through than fat and muscle). I once did a simulation assuming 100kHz from a CW tesla coil or ferrite transformer and a skin depth on actual skin was something like 5 feet (=basically nonexistent since no one is 10 feet wide), and even 100MHz was several inches assuming the voltage was 500V or more (enough to burn through skin) so skin effect probably wouldn't save you, it just makes you cook longer before you notice since it tends to destroy nerves as it preferably moves across them. Now with lightning strikes it's a bit different, most of the energy goes around the person rather than through them (otherwise they would not only certainly die every time but explode where they stood like a small tree) since plasma is a better conductor than human bodies, and with 100MV corona is all over you down to your feet right before you get struck. And yes given the same energy I would definitely prefer the 250kV over 1kV if I had to pick one for the reasons you stated.
I really appreciate the love for electronics you share Mr Carlson. I started watching your channel 3 years ago and have a gathered a wealth of knowledge. I fixed a popcorn machine today and I'm damn proud. Thank you again
I (Radiofun232, YT user) am interested in that question too, also the exact time when the arcing happened, part of the day, wind conditions, the type of snow (snowstorm), the wiring into the radio shack, + the schematic of the antenna construction and the radio (basics of course, especially the power supply part) and the way it was connected to the mains supply).
He told you in the video that it was a center fed (extremely) long wire for LF-MF SWR radio reception. He only had the center feed wire of the coax connected to the old tube AM radio at the tuning input cap. This is why it's so important to have a DC grounded antenna, then this discharge will go to the ground rod through the loading coil.
@@rolomaticz5009 OK, my idea is that the antenna is/was charged by frictional electricity, caused by the snow, pushed by the wind. But the snow (weather situation) must have been dry in that case. And with frictional electricity both positive and negative charge can be caused, depends on the materials. So that is why I am/was interested in the whole electric setup.
Yes! We want pictures. Videos. Yes, antennas are a much videoed topic. But we have never seen the details of how the Master Electronics Carlson does it!
I think you have two air gaps breaking down microseconds apart. The chassis is isolated, so the incoming static electricity is charging what in effect is a parasitic capacitor between the chassis and its surroundings. It's very cold outside so the humidity is low. The voltage on the chassis will steadily increase until it flashes to ground through the path of least resistance, which I suspect is the air gap between the primary and secondary windings of the isolation transformer. Once the accumulated static charge dumps to ground, the potential between the chassis and the coax instantly jumps from zero to several thousand volts. This risetime is so fast that the inductor blocks the inrush current forcing it to take another path to the chassis. That path is the narrow air gap between the coax and the radio chassis. You have inadvertently created a relaxation oscillator.
About 50 years ago at WFEA, Manchester, New Hampshire, I saw the same phenomena of arcing in the open wire feed line. When we opened the switch to the line at the transmitter end we had 6” arcs across the knife switch. Lasted for several hours.
When I was young I traveled a lot on train with my mom, and sometimes when we waited for the train and it was raining, our umbrellas would start giving us shocks. That was probably because the raindrops captured charge from the HV wires and carried it not only down but sideways for several meters, and deposited it on the umbrellas. Maybe you don't have HV lines near but the snowflakes may have charge just by friction - or maybe they carry charge all the way down from the clouds and this is like a micro thunderstorm during winter.
I "heard" the effects of static build up /discharge on an old VW bug during an approaching thunderstorm tornado. The Bendix radio in that car had a little neon lamp across the antenna center coax lead to chassis. The radio would squeal in a rising pitch until the lightening would flash, then the squeal fell silent, only to start a new. I can only imagine that neon lamp was glowing away creating some sort of oscillation. Atmospheric/Global /Space Weather is an odd thing. Very cool topic, thanks for creating and sharing this video
@@jordanrodrigues8265 I remember building a "relaxation" code practice oscillator using a Ne-2 neon lamp. I was not exactly sure about the physics but they are very interesting.
Great story! 33kV / cm in dry air to get an arc. You must have had a good storm. I saw this as a child. Arcing was occurring across a PL259 connector for my father's CB radio antenna. The antenna was a fiberglass coaxial-type vertical and was ungrounded. I can't explain why you were getting an arc across 36 ohms. Weird unless you had RF and a reactance that blocked the 36 ohms from shunting the current. I look forward to more depth on this one. Thanks!!
@@Drottninggatan2017 Yes. Only connected to antenna with other end in free air. It was windy and there may have been a storm approaching. This was in 1970's.
Great video as always! I observed the same phenomenon in my shack last year. I heard what sounded like a clicking sound and tracked it down to the power supply that powered the 2m rig. The clicking sound was a discharge from the common mode power filter to chassis ground. I disconnected the antenna from the radio and the discharge stopped. The outside weather was windy and very dry, no snow or rain. My conclusion was static buildup on the antenna and discharging through the power supply. As you observed, there was no damage to the radio or to the power supply.
We make concessions for precision and resolution. Over a decade and a half as an RF bench engineer and this is a fun thought project. Are the labs built to R56 or similar standard? Have you tested the quality of your line voltage and grounds? I've seen highly charged air and mediocre grounds clash in expensive ways like this, especially if you throw in distant lightning strikes. It's just enough sometimes to cause unshielded ICs to internally become something different forever and let the games begin. This is an interesting one and will be following along as usual! Thank you for sharing!
Back in 1987, I had a an assembly of dipole antennas for each band connected to a single coax. These antennas were hanging high above the roof of the eight floor building I lived in at the time. I always disconnected the coax connector from my Hamradio transceiver when I was not using it. One day during an approaching rainstorm, I heard the same kind of clicking noise which increased in intensity as the storm was approaching and I discovered an arc forming between ground and the center pin of the PL259 connector. The same thing would happen wintertime at low temperatures when it was snowing. I made sure to stay away from the cable when this was happening. Greetings from Sweden.
I live on a hilltop in NY State and in the winter I keep my antennas grounded when snow storms pass through. Twenty years ago I heard arcing during a storm and traced it to a multiple band coax switch and realized the floating inputs from the 75 meter antenna was arcing inside of it. Very interesting. Back in the 70's in another QTH, I was in the process of disconnecting my antennas during a sudden thunder storm and had arcs jumping across the PL 259 connection while I removed it from a coax switch. Mother Nature likes to surprise us every now and then. Thankfully in my case not fatally, so far.
Had this happened to anybody else I would have dismissed it without a thought. Thanks for taking the time to capture the event. Looking forward to your analisis.
you may want to check your isolation transformer as it may be damaged by the arcing. the arcing could burn off the varnish on the windings and cause them to short. the driver in the led bulb is what is damaged. if you take the bulb apart and connect a 50 volt source from a battery to the led board they should work fine. i have had a couple of led bulb go bad and cycle on and off and so when i tear down the bulb and remove the driver and then series a few 9 volt batteries to the led it lights ok.
I was part of a team of 100 re-imaging the subsurface of the Alaskan north slope oil field in 1992. We were working in the lab (trailer on skis pulled by a cat) when we were hit with a blizzard at around 50 below Fahrenheit. We had cables that had analog pairs that would bring back signal from our sensors. During the storm the 45 mph wind was blowing snow horizontally across our cables. The static protection in the cables interconnects included gas tubes which would light at about 60 volts. These tubes were lit up like a Christmas tree. At those temperatures there is little or no humidity. In the course of that winter we did also see ball lightning, which I understand is very rare to sight.
When a young fellow listening to shortwave radio in Manitoba in winter blizzard on my Heathkit GR91 on a bare copper longwire antenna I experienced what I thought was static electricity snapping quite loudly quite ofen. Radio kept working. May be the same scenario. Don from your Patreon site.
This reminds me of a weird night about 30 years ago. It involved my CB radio aerial and coax. We had been having a few storms during that autumn, and I had disconnected my CB aerial as a precaution against lightning strikes. A few weeks later, and still disconnected, the plug on the end of my CB coax began sparking, very much as you see in this video. A very steady and regular tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, and looking very much like the kind of spark you'd expect from a car's plug leads, held about a quarter inch from grounded metal. The gap between the parts where the spark was jumping was about 3/8". There was nothing connected to the aerial or coax, and the aerial was a loaded dipole, that's to say both the driven pole, and the ground pole (tied to coax braid) had loading coils to tune them for use at 27MHz. The aerial was mounted vertically at the regulation maximum of 21ft above ground, and was mounted atop a wooden pole which was in turn mounted on top of a steel mast. Weather conditions were heavy fog and very light breeze - the kind of fog you can see moving horizontally. Naturally, I didn't stick my fingers on the end of the plug to see how lively it was, but it was fair cracking out those sparks. I had to be up for work next morning so I was more concerned about bed than faffing around to investigate this odd phenomenon, so I cautiously hefted the coax out through the window and left it at that. I've never seen it happen again.
Best part about this is now having a proper interface to some real lab equipment. This is fascinating. Thanks for including us in the mystery and how to perhaps quantify and explain it. 36 Ohms to ground is basically ground.
Pecipitation Static (or P-static) is what you were experiencing. I know it well like many others. It is a high voltage near zero current charge that builds on antenna due to precipitation or other small particles in the air. The reason for the snap is that your coax acts like a high voltage capacitor and builds up charge. The charge is from the particles which cause a pulsing charge for each particle hitting the antenna. Even though you had 35 Ohms DC to the chassis the pulsing DC is more like broad band arc noise. Simple arc style lightning or charge arrestor will prevent this. You can also install what are known as "porcupine" or "maple leaf" style static dissipator that reduce this effect. You may have noticed many on commercial towers and tall structures.
High voltage can get very weird very fast! My guess is that the capacitor is flashing over, and the fast pulse doesn't go via the inductor. Path to ground is unclear, probably the isolation transformer, or perhaps the mat is bleeding away charge to ground, or its flashing over the insulation on the line cord, since it looks like you have those wires crossing over!
I have seen something like that in a TV broadcast antenna. We found out that there was a Voltage buildup and when the Voltage reached about 30K Volt, it could jump over relays that were switched off. When it then arced over, it could also arc around components. I was new at that moment so did not understand much of it but it looked much like you showed.
Oh, I had similar happen on a coax cable leading to a large CB antenna. There were storms nearby and I disconnected the coax cable from the CB base station. A little while later I started hearing a pop every couple seconds, and found a spark jumping from the center to the shield. I think the antenna was picking up static from the air.
Back around 1976, I was driving home on the highway on a summer night. There were storms brewing around but it wasn't storming or raining where I was. I kept hearing this clicking about every second or so. It took me a bit but I finally figured out it was coming from my in dash stereo. The unit had a trim cap on the front for tweaking in the antenna. The noise was an arc coming from the trim cap. I could see a flash every time I heard the snap. Needless to say I reached in the back and unplugged the antenna. Didn't affect the radio luckily.
No in the desert the air was still. It was a low pressure area coming through. Apparently there is a normal altitude / voltage profile. It must have been pumped right up.
One of the things that the old 1930's Radio guys used to do when building a big antenna system was to include a spark-gap on the outside of their radio shack where the antenna was fed in, one side of the spark-gap was connected to the antenna, the other end was connected to a long copper or brass rod that was driven into the ground.
@@Fourcycle Good observation. There are possibly critical details in this event that need to be noted and modeled before our speculations here can be checkable. I've noted others have pointed out quality of AC line grounds to his home as a possible concern, and Carlson's video didn't explain the situation of the coax from the antenna to the radio unambiguously from an mateur radio operator's perspective, e.g. were the usual RF/lightning/AC-safety grounds and safety measures applied at the point where the coax penetrates into the home/lab? Or, was it a single contiguous piece of coax from up at the wires in the air, to the BNC connector he attached his shield-lifting pigtail to? (which somehow seems like a bad idea, esp. in retrospect)
Gameboygenius nailed it. Just because you were observing an arc in the radio does not mean that was the primary source. Very likely, as the antenna was charging due to the snowfall, that it eventually arced to ground somewhere. Either across the dipole legs, to a support structure, or even inside the BNC connector. When it discharged the input side of the radio’s blocking capacitor changed from being at several thousand volts to near zero in nanoseconds thus causing the secondary arc you observed and also explains how it could establish such a high voltage across the 36 ohm resistor without it going up in smoke.
This neon is a common trick (it needs to handle transmit voltages as well of course, or be disconnected for transmit.). Another is to put about 10 or more MegOhms of resistance to ground to bleed off the static buildup from snow or wind.
I worked as a cable line technician near the CFRB radio towers... I came across situations like this quite often... and during diagnostics we decided to double ground every piece of equipment to try and eliminate the rf energy. This energy was enough to cause burns from touching metal amps dist taps, cables including grounds... It was the greatest learning experience in career...
@@edinfific2576 Yes. it is aproxemently what happens in thunderstorms, but in less scale. The snowflakes hit the antennawire, and makes static electrisy up to 2-3 Kv. But very little amps. You wil not die by getting this voltage in Your fingers, but you will feel it very hard! (Sorry for my English). As you are in a hotell, walk on a blanket, and push the elevator knob. Maybe you have some experience With that? Or going out of a car, touch the ground, and then are near some of the metal on the car afterwords? Hope you understood me there Edin! LB1NH Arild
If there was a 30 or so ohm resistor between your body and the ground while you were walking on the carpet, I doubt any charge would build up. Please try another explanation.
Interesting video. My dad was a ham radio guy and I remember him always attaching a heavy ground clip onto his main antenna whenever he wasn't working. The ground clip went directly to a rod driven into the earth outside the house. Don't know if that saved him any damage from snow static along the way.
It may also be related to the dust content in the air at that moment. It is a known phenomenon. Search for dust triboelectric charge. In serious storm, dust may charge up to 15 kV in dry conditions. In US one must look for Peoria Loess dust releases which usually occur in winter time.
You, and many others, are missing the fact that there was a 30 or so ohm resistance between the capacitor and ground, through the coil. This should earth the antenna and prevent any static build up on it, unless it's some AC or RF phenomenon that interacts with the reactance of the coil and capacitor in the radio.
@@tasmedic Would you care pointing the time where Paul says that the antenna was grounded? At 3:54 he clearly states that the antenna was not grounded.
@@ciprianpopa1503 My bad. However both sides of the antenna were outside. so both would have developed a similar charge, with one leg being connected to the chassis of the radio, and the other to the antenna socket. No net potential between chassis and antenna means no current flow. Your turn.... Also please point out where Paul says there was a dust storm. I think he said there was a snow storm but I can't be bothered to trawl through the video to find the exact time. Even if there WAS a static potential between the antenna socket and the chassis, please explain how an electrostatic charge could build up when the resistance between chassis and the coil connected to the antenna socket is around 30 ohms.
@@tasmedic So my turn then. Dust raises always in front of a weather front, termed haboob (from Arab language) due to their frequency in the hot desert areas. A snow storm is a dry event that can sometimes produce a snow haboob which raises dust ahead of its path if it encounters a dust source. Paul indeed said in was a snow storm and I hypothesised a potential cause for the discharges he presented here, and I expanded my reasoning above. Your turn now. And P.S. I am not supposed to explain anything, I just named a possibility, and whatever you are claiming the Paul's setup was during the recorded event has to be confirmed by Paul only, otherwise we are only in the realm of suppositions.
@@movax20h If the isolation transformer is of the 3 prong grounded type on the primary, my guess would be the ground prong is grounded to the transformer laminated core. The transformer would easily arc from the secondary to the core. Not likely for a 2 prong version to arc from the primary to the secondary winding, unless the neutral side is connected to the core as well. That is my guess.
I admit that after seeing this video, I was intrigued and gave this some thoughts... My current theory is that there was another spark in the isolation transformer as you mentioned: The sequence is that the chassis is charged up through the 36ohm resistance (coil) until the breakdown voltage for the isolation transformer is reached. Once the spark in the isolation transformer is ignited, the chassis voltage is pulled closer to ground (due to the lower resistance of the ionized air in the spark). The coil connecting the chassis to the antenna has a relatively low DC impedance (36ohm), but at high frequency, the impedance is probably relatively high, so the chassis voltage can be pulled lower even though the antenna voltage is still high. There's probably enough charge/capacitance in the antenna to initiate a spark in the radio once the chassis voltage has been pulled down enough... A few points that comes from this theory: 1) The spark in the isolation transformer must require a higher breakdown voltage than the spark in the radio otherwise there would be no sparking in the radio, and 2) The coil is absolutely necessary for this effect to occur: the chassis needs to be charged through a "low" resistance, then when the spark in the isolation transformer is initiated, this resistance must go high very quickly (basically, the textbook definition of the behavior of an inductor), 3) I haven't grasped how exactly to fit the capacitor into this theory: There could actually be some RF/ringing effect... In any case, this is fascinating, and I would never had thought that a simple snowfall could cause this much power to be developed across an antenna (now I'm also wondering just how common this is?)
I know nothing about these RF stuff, but by googling I found a claim: _"Class-Y safety capacitors are designed to fail open."_ If that is the case, your *capacitor* still *might be broken.*
I guess I’m more impressed than surprised‽ Are you comfortable sharing the aprox time, zone and date of this occurrence, if you haven’t already? Clearly some kind of triboelectric phenomenon perhaps between the dry snow and the dipole elements or an atmospheric high voltage differential between the clouds and the ground?
What a neat feature you've discovered! Your FADA receiver can double as a spark gap transmitter in a snow storm! If I were you, I'd be grounding the entire outdoor array whenever you see a big atmospheric pressure drop. If you need an antenna in these conditions, use an indoor loop instead!
Quite a few years ago, I had a similar occurrence. Where I live, I need an antenna amp, a good antenna and coax lead in to receive decent broadcast tv reception. One very cold night during a snowstorm, reception went to pot. Suspecting the amp, I disconnected the coax from the amp, and I can confirm that yes, that _hurt_. (Yep, I got zapped.) Every few seconds a spark would jump from the center wire to the f connector ring. Really weird. And yes, I had to get a new antenna amp.
I hope the your antenna amp is a tube amp, not a transistor amp. Tubes are mechanically frail and inefficient and huge (they are made of glass) and they can break easily, but ELECTRICALLY they are extremely rugged. An overvoltage situation would cause temporary arcing between the grids and the cathode and plate, which is nothing more than some tiny burn marks which are not a problem. But a transistor would be irreversably ZAPPED instantly, even high-powered power transistors! Transistors can handle large amounts of power, but getting out of there specifications for even a fraction of a second would zap them. Maybe that's why the Russians insisted on using tube radios in their military aircraft during the Cold War during the Soviet Union days.
(I am commenting on my own comment): I forgot to add one more thing: the issue of EMP's. EMP's (electromagnetic pulses) can damage solid-state devices much more easily than vacuum tube devices. We must be very vigilant about our computer-controlled power grid, people with implantable devices like pacemakers and cell phones and tablets. Unfortunately, it is impossible to make computers with present technology that don't employ solid-state devices. Our technology is EXCELLENT, we just have to be very careful.
I had the same snapping sound in my shack (Last century!). I hunted it down and it was an older Swan VHF radio with a TX/RX relay. I had a VHF antenna on top of a 50 foot tower in a snow storm connected to the radio. It was arcing across the relay. As to your coil/capacitor issue, consider the ignition system in an old car. They had a coil and a condenser, a capacitor. The breaker points would pull 12 volts through the coil, building up a magnetic field, then opened the circuit. The condenser allowed enough time for the points to open without completely discharging the magnetic field through the points. The points, if improperly adjusted, would go bad from the arcing. What happens is the field is trying to collapse and will build up whatever voltage it needs to jump a spark. The arc is a sign of voltage, not current. The higher the voltage, the longer distance the arc. In the car ignition, the 12 volt side is attempting to jump an .018 inch gap. But the high voltage side of the coil sees a .035 inch gap easier to jump at around 10,000 volts. So it arcs at the spark plug instead of the points. It doesn't mean your capacitor is bad. It means it is blocking the current allowing the field to build up in the coil until it can jump the gap to the chassis. If you have seen lightning in a snow storm, the energy is coming from the charged snow hitting your antenna looking for ground.
I am surprised that there aren't that many people using neon bulbs from both sides of the antenna to earth-ground. We used to do that years ago to drain the DC picked up by the antenna. There are many weather conditions that can build up a static charge on an antenna. Having the physical disconnecting equipment for storms is very wise.
And what you'd really wanna do is not simply unplug the coax, but short the center to the shield at that end, then connect that to station earth ground.
@@AmishSpecialForces In stormy conditions, anyway! I wonder, if both sides the the coax are going thru gas-discharge tubes to station earth, in that state can you still use the antenna on the radio for RX (simple enough to check) or TX (more doubtful about that one)?
Mr. Carlson, two things came to mind about the phenomena: 1) What were the humidity levels outside at the time and in your lab? IIRC, low humidity is conducive to static electricity. One thing I've heard our local meteorologists here in New Jersey mention is "dry snow". 2) Could any sort of magnetic field have been present at the time creating a sort of transformer effect? I'm quite a novice in all these fields, but I figured I'd share my thoughts. Thanks for sharing your experience.
I had this happen to me twice here in Arizona. I had a end fed long wire up about 20 ft and about 70 ft in length. The (shack side) antenna end wasn't connected to anything just close to a piece of metal drywall corner strip and it started to tick.. tick .. tick (HV arcs) between the antenna wire and the metal strip while I was sitting here. The clouds over head looked lower than usual and very angry looking. I haven't had noticed anything similar with the hustler vertical. And I got rid of the long wire.
Paul, I was curious about the antenna. Is it grounded, and is it grounded to the breaker box? I was asked to correct my ground to meet code requirements.
When I lived in northern IL we called it thundersnowing. Saw it happen many times. Really cool to watch! I don't miss the below zero temps up there lol!
Back in Missouri, we had a teacher describe what your talking about, except he had no antenna, what he had was lighting rods on top of his house. And the Cable (#0 ???) running down the side of the house would glow RED from the current being taken off the the lighting rod spikes during the winter- no snow, just really cold outside and windy. It would have been interesting if you could use one of your scopes to catch RF from the spark.
When I saw you reach up and pull that service module out of the o-scope, I was flabbergasted. I always thought that view of you sitting in your lab was a blue-screen like montage. LOL. P.S. As to your arcing issue, you might have heard that gravitational waves are being emitted by the giant star Betelgeuse and may indicate it is about to go supernova. Coincidence? I think not! LOL^2
I’ve seen something similar at an AM broadcast station I was working at. It looked like we were going to get some rain and I noticed the transmitter meters briefly jump at random. I found the cause at the antenna. There was a chain of sparks jumping the insulators on all three of the top guy wires. Fascinating and more than a little bit terrifying. It stopped when the rain started. The transmitter never did go off the air.
@@Very_Dark_Engineer Please recall arcs are used in the old-time spark gap radio transmitters and Tesla coils for an RF source. In addition, a fast rise time consists of multiple higher frequencies, sine waves, per Fourier analysis.
I can see the conversation with the insurance adjuster and his response, "SOooooo, you're saying your garage burned down because of the snow." Your response can now be, "Have you NOT SEEN Mr. Carlson's Lab on RUclips!"
Aircraft aerosol geoengineering contains heavy metal particles. Cloud seeing uses aluminum, barium, strontium and silver iodide. Combined with high powered output from scatter radar, the natural environment is becoming increasingly ionized.
You truly have a God-given talent and knowledge that we are all the better for having observed. I plan to join your Patreon site this month (I do not join Patreon sites) and start the electronics videos. Hopefully, it's for old dummies like me.
1) Be sure you tighten the knob on your Tek scope so the module does not slide out! Making me nervous! 2) The precipitation static from the snow is wideband random EM noise. The 36 ohm resistance of the coil is not draining much energy, instead the inductance and capacitance of the circuit are resonant to some of that WB noise and therefore the voltage is building until the little "Spark Gap" flashes over. I had a ground plane CB antenna years ago and during a snow storm I could light a neon bulb across the PL259 terminals of the coax. You have sort of a mini Tesla coil thing going on in the radio. 3) You need to ground that feedline and install a Polyphaser gas discharge lightning protector. Check all the wiring into your labs to make sure you don't have a serious lightning damage situation in the future. Motorola R56 is an excellent source for grounding and bonding recommendations. Polyphaser also publishes white papers on the subject.
It takes 100,000 volts to start an arc across a 1 inch air gap. Every time you ground a lighting strike you only get rid of 1/10 of the voltage. The average lighting strike is 5 miles that is a lot of voltage and it has enough amperage to melt sand into glass.
I seem to remember 35kv to cover an inch gap. Let's see what google says. Quora says 75kv so it looks like we split the difference. Of course it will vary with conditions.
Perhaps conditions were right for a tree branch (or dirty insulator) to intermittently arc to a nearby power line? This would create a spark gap transmitter, with your antenna capturing enough energy to manifest as arcing in your receiver? Alternatively, conditions were such that your antenna was accumulating each tiny charge from the snowflakes, until breakdown occurred. In either case, the impedance of the coil was likely to be far greater than the DC value; short duration “transient” spikes could see the cap as a short and the coil as an open, possibly allowing for the voltage to build rapidly to the level where it would cause cause arcing to the chassis. If you figure it out, please make another video. And thank you for the wonderful work you do!
I had this happen to me. I heard the noise first like you. After a lot of head scratching we disconnected the coax from the radio. The sound followed the coax. Looking into the end of the connector you could see a purple light behind the phenolic center conductor insulator. By holding the insulated part of the cable we discharged it to a doorknob. Center conductor to knob. Nice spark! It was snow.
This type of thing is usually related to purely atmospheric weather instead of space weather. Has to do with wind (sometimes aided by dust or precipitation) or even just precipitation forcing the normal flow of current within the atmosphere to grow in magnitude. It's why connecting any electronics _directly_ to an antenna is bad design.
This is amazing, if i recall correctly from a Richard Feynman book, that every meter or so up is like 100k volts up into the atmosphere. so possibly the snow is still charged with high voltage from the outer atmosphere and conveys that to whatever it touches, but you need to collect the static from a lot of snow to notice it. just an idea.
Professor your lab looks more like the inside of a 1950/60s TV made Space Ship without a view screen. (Grins) But how do you have room to work on anything in that tight space?
I mean, there’s even camera & defff other extra recording equipment you can’t see (obviously...) that takes up even *more* room/space than what you already imagine... and he has hundreds of videos literally showing himself working in this very shop you described/mentioned (?)... He has room to work cuz he is organized and just makes it work..? Sorry, your observation is interesting (working in a small shop is difficult and organization is *paramount*.. what Mr. Carlson accomplishes in this shop *is amazing*) it’s just the question that followed your observation is defff a bit of a head scratcher for me.. lol
@John Chrysostom Until about a year ago he did all the work at the desk behind him. There is a desk to his left he used for things like PCB etching. He has a video of both labs and the storage area next to Lab 2 somewhere in his video library. Pretty cool stuff.
I have noticed lots of similar arcing both from rain and snow into my antennas when I was a teen in the 70-80's , for instance my CB rig was a Lafayette HE-20T connected to a 1/4 GP and I had it in my room. Sometimes I woke at night hearing this arcing sound from the the radio when it was heavy snow or rain weather outside. When I removed the PL-259 from the radio I noticed sparcs between the shield and pin, jumping up to 10 mm so it may be 10-25 kV static charge in the antenna. Even heavy wind will charge antennas, the solution is to use DC grounded antennas.
In broadcast engineering, we use inductors from AM towers to ground. The towers are hot, but the inductors are high impedance at RF, but they generally bleed static charges off BEFORE there is an arc. My point on your experience: strange.
Nah, simple static accumulation, complicated by some part or another of his radio setup. The snow is a dead giveaway, as would be a sandstorm, and maybe simple high winds. They all force the charge accumulation rate higher than normal.
Gotta love the scopemeter. I all but lusted after one of those as a geeky teen and then decades later realised "you're an adult, you've got disposable income, have one if you want!" It's got 101 flaws, but it's still a lovely bit of kit.
Boy! It's 'snow-wonder' that arc was happening. I paused the video at every arc and noticed that each one looked different. So it's true that no two arcs are the same.
I would get arcing at my pl-259 connectors (disconnected from switches) from my 40m verticals during snow, or even before a summer storm. Would light up behind the teflon dielectric of the fitting. A great teaching moment for the grandkids.
I have seen (and heard) similar arcing happen on a disconnected antenna cable. My brother had a big antenna on the roof and at that moment nothing connected to it. we started hearing this sort of clicking noise and after searching for it for a while we found out it was arcing from the core to the shield at the connector.making this very audible "click" noise. And yes it was heavy snowfall at the time. This happened in the early eighties and i had forgotten about it. This video reminded me of that happening.
Thanks Paul, this just goes to prove that Tesla was right that the planet is buzzing with free atmospheric electricity waiting to be tapped into and an antenna is one way to obtain it, the higher the antenna the stronger the voltage, although it is not very strong, obviuos.y the snow moving throgh the air was creating a higher charge, fascinating very enjoyable, cheers Paul, always a pleasure watching your stuff.
To learn more about electronics in a very different and effective way, and gain access to Mr Carlson's personal designs and inventions, visit the Mr Carlson's Lab Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/MrCarlsonsLab
@@neil6958 I'm in the UK and despite my other comment, yours was interesting as we in London have had more power outages in recent times and two in the last couple of days..
thank you Dr for the video.
I have a suspicion that when snow falls off of a wire it can leave a charge behind because the charge spreads to the outside of a conductor. Thus most of the (prob negative) charge would go with the lumps of snow that the wind shakes off.
I get a series of zaps while vacuuming ash from my pellet stove...Sparks jump to my hand thru the plastic hose as the dry ash particles flow. There is likely an AC component of pulses building the charge induced on your antenna. That explains a potential across the inductor in your radio's front end....
@@coilsmoke2286 It is the way the static took to get to earth that puzzles me though. See what happened on my other comment.
If you play with snow, you are doing it at your own risk. Leave snow to the professionals like me.
Hey ! That line is copyrighted by Paul of Mr Carlson's Lab..
Just take care :)
Braking News: Electrronics starts housefire becurse it was snowing outside.
And whatever you do, kids- DON'T EAT THE YELLOW SNOW.
There's No Business Like snow business.
Especially in North America.
Very interesting phenomenon. Here's my analysis of it. The first clue is that you got an arc to the chassis despite the 36 ohm coil to ground. That means that the arc must have been caused by a spike of current, as that is the only condition where the coil is high impedance. So what I think happened is this: static built up on the aerial from the wind. This slowly charged the X1 capacitor. At this point the chassis and the arc point are at the same potential, while the aerial is charged to however many kV.
When the capacitor is sufficiently charged, an arc happens. This is not the arc in the receiver, but a big arc between the two sides of the aerial. As a path opens to ground, the X1 capacitor starts to quickly discharge. However, due to the high impedance of the coil, the current discharging the capacitor must find another way. And within microseconds, the potential over the chassis rises enough to create the arc that you witnessed.
So the final discharge loop is: one side of the X1 capacitor --- the coax --- one side of the aerial --- arc --- the grounded side of the aerial --- electrical wiring --- probably another arc in the isolation transformer --- the chassis --- the arc in the receiver --- the other side of the X1 capacitor. This would also have enough loop area to create the strangeness in the speakers.
And for maximum youtuber collaboration awesomeness, may I suggest that you send the broken LED lamp to Big Clive?
So in theory you could make a static electricity generator/collector via wind over antenna array if I follow the gist of your theory.
@@wolfiexii Of course you could. It wouldn't be very efficient by any means but if all you wanted was to see sparks over a spark gap, why not... The mystery in this case though is not how snow could create static electricity (that's pretty obvious) but the exact mechanism of how everything in the circuit finally produced an arc to the chassis despite the 36 ohm coil in parallel.
@@wolfiexii you're forgetting the coax creates a capacitor that can shape pulses all on its own. I'm guessing the coax and antenna charge up, discharge happens outside and the pulse is large and fast enough that it blows through anything between it and earth.
Gameboygenius Hi - the other side of the dipole is not grounded from his description so has no path to ground.
It doesn't necessarily need to be grounded, it just needs a different potential.
I'm a broadcast Engineer who specializes in maintaining AM arrays. We were hooking up a new tower in an older 4 tower array and there was an electrical storm approaching. one of the guys with me touched the tower and got a healthy shock from it! (the transmitter was off). We measured about 120 volts AC across the base insulator! Since then we use a jumper cable to ground the tower and make it more safe. Also don't play with a 285 foot lightening rod with electrical storms around!
Was the snow the dry, powdery kind? If so, your antenna rig created a charge-separation accumulator. The atmospheric voltage gradient between ground and your antenna can be several kilovolts. In dry conditions, each flake of snow forms a tiny capacitor and picks up a charge when high in the atmosphere. As these flakes pass by the antenna elements, they dump their charge. Any insulation or resistance would allow the charge to build up in the antenna until breakdown is achieved.
In a similar vein, I worked for a blimp company many years ago. We had grounding chains hanging from the envelope to ground the static charges that would build up during flight. Because the envelope was basically a giant capacitor (made of polyester), lethal voltages could accumulate during dry weather. The last thing you wanted your ground crew to do was touch the metal handrails of the gondola before the chains hit the ground!
This is similar to helicopter blades building up static charges.
Uh huh. I've encountered this a couple times. It's not uncommon for wind to build up very high static charges on antenna towers and similar structures, especially if they're isolated from earth. It's more rare to see that with snow but it certainly happens. Yeah, a very long dipole could easily get thousands of volts built up on it as flakes pass by or land on it. Once at a TV station with a thunderstorm approaching, it was not yet storming, the 500 foot tower was well grounded, as were the guy wire tie points, yet there were periodic arcs from the lower wires to ground from about 20 feet above ground. Yes, very long arcs. They only last for a moment. Which brings up another thing, these static discharges, and lightning and related, occur very very fast exhibiting a very high frequency. That safety cap was likely undamaged because it passed the arc easily. Being such high frequency the cap looks like a short. Since it happens only periodically and so quickly nothing heats up, nothing gets damaged. Solid state devices however could certainly die in that very short time.
I get a series of zaps while vacuuming ash from my pellet stove...Sparks jump to my hand thru the plastic hose as the dry ash particles flow. There is likely an AC component of pulses building the charge induced on your antenna. That explains a potential across the inductor in your radio's front end....
is it pulling electron off the antenna , or dumping positive charge on the antenna ??
40-something years messing with electronics and I have NEVER seen or heard of this! Awesome!
More than 40 years for me and for at least 40 years I have always disconnected my long antennas when not in use for specifically this reason.
you can be shocked by dry pine trees when it's very dry out if the snow is just a cone on the tips of the needles... I've been hit dozens of times by the effect. Ice has many forms and snowflakes change with electrostatic charges
Excellent video mystery! RF Antenna engineer here. You built a Tesla coil! My thought is that you have an open circuit transmission line that is of a 1/4 wavelength multiple. What freq was the radio tuned to. Did you change it without effect? The dielectric strength of air at RF is 15kV/inch. You have at least 2KV at that arc. Easy to get voltage step-ups of 5 to 10 times with a transmission resonant transmission line in a partially connected radio. It's how a Tesla coil really works. His secondary was a critically coupled slow wave 1/4 wavelength open circuit transmission line resonator. At Co. Springs the resonant freq was just below 100kHz and about 95% efficient at Co. Springs in 1899. Keep em glowing but not arcing!
As A commercial pilot, I have gotten St. Elmo's Fire from snow! It is a real thing, even with snow.
NBNTelevision the first time you see it and you haven’t heard of if it freaks the hell out of you!
Could you also see a new horizon underneath the blazing sky?
Annnnnnd...isn't it also the case that it doesn't harm your radio equipment? Even though it's all solid state gear these days?
I mean, if I take Carlson's fearful comments at face value, one would expect electronic equipment damage aboard aircraft whenever this phenomena occurs; esp. the radios. But, (normally? generally?) it doesn't happen! Planes get where they're going fine, despite flying thru wild fields of static potential up there.
I'm not yet convinced it wasn't simply because he had his lab+rig+antenna system connected in some unfavorable way somehow.
Andrew Skretvedt Quite the contrary. Aircraft are very different. We aren’t properly grounded. We have static wicks on trailing edges to help dissipate static electricity. In my experience, I’ve had avionics damaged from static. I am not as familiar with the isolation techniques used in avionics, but it’s kind of a different game from radios here on the ground, something I’m much more familiar with. Static can and does damage avionics. That’s why we have backups for backups.
@@atsdroid I replaced about 200 IP phones at one place in Reno, they all died from call center agents plugging in their headsets after walking inside each morning. Electromigration is a thing, it becomes more of an issue as junctions become smaller. If that arc kept going forever on the tube radio, eventually it would eat a hole in the chassis. It's a lot easier to burn a hole in a silicon die where junctions are the size of a few atoms. Eventually the phone was redesigned to improve decoupling at the headset port, but that same tiny shock applied to any other part of the board would still probably kill it. It's impossible to isolate everything, at such tiny scales. This is basic physics, not "fearful comments". It's a huge multi trillion dollar ongoing challenge in aerospace. A single charged particle can break 1000s of electrons loose, and it can be hard to predict where they go. Real world testing and revisions are required. This is why the radiation hardened parts used on aircraft lag several generations behind modern technology, on top of the larger processes being less susceptible to radiation damage in the first place
I have heard of this happening several times from HAM radio friends who had long wire receiving antenna's (REALLY LONG WIRES for ELF and VLF frequencies) seeing ARCS and in one instance getting physically shocked! This incident was recalled by a famous radio show host in the U.S.A. whose name was Art Bell who hosted the "Coast to Coast" radio show on late night, Art recalled this event on one of his show's a few decades ago!! Art has been a "Silent Key" now for quite a few years!! Yea dry snow with wind behind it could really generate some high voltages on a long wire!!
John Bellas KC2UVN 73's Interesting to see this happening! Thanks for the video!! Just before any storms with or without wind, I always disconnect antenna feeds with a switching system that disconnects all my equipment of any antenna's and grounds them out even though they have static suppressors inline on the coax as well as lightning protection outside the house!!
Smart man.
I also recall Art Bell talking about it on his show back in the day.
Question I would have, would this be a potential for a fire while someone was away and not making the disconnects that would be required? I'm guessing yes.
@@jdmccorful , Oh yes!!!!
@@jdmccorful that's why you can buy a static discharge arrestor... which attaches to the coax from the antenna. It grounds (discharges) the electrical charges. Useful to have.
I would be interested to see if you find any issue with your isolation transformer in lab 2, especially since I have the same one. I also would love to see a video entirely on safety capacitors, how to tell if you need them and where to put them in old radios, as well as determining proper capacitance for them. This arc'ing issue you've seen seems to play right into that.
When I was Active Duty in the Marines we would see similar instances of static charges building up and discharging in our High Frequency Aircraft radios when it snowed or stormed real bad. Especially prevalent on the ARC-94 HF transceivers and they’d knock you into the next room of you were forgetful and left the grounding clamps off them. It must have been coming down hard to be jumping an air gap that big. Super glad you caught that and shared it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it
Hi I really enjoy Watching your videos... Here is a hypothesis on the effects you are seeing... As the snow strikes the antenna a static charge is built up and passes down the antenna, as the chassis is not grounded charge builds up on the entire chassis of the radio until it reaches the brake down voltage required to overcome the insulation of the isolation transformer, when this arc occurs not only is the charge on the chassis of the radio sent to ground but all the charge on the antenna which must pass through the aforementioned 30ish ohm coil as the current spike passes through the coil it generates a massive magnetic field which then collapses creating a very high voltage spike across the coil causing the arc observed ( essentially the coil is both a primary and secondary all in one. In this case earth is one plate of a capacitor and the antenna is the other.
I'm still amazed at all this. At 64 I am trying to learn enough about electronics to restore my old Zenith Trans-Oceanic H500. After six months of reading watching and doing my best to absorb, I feel confident enough to really screw things up. I'm still forging ahead and will eventually reach a sub-novice level and maybe be able to test and replace caps, diodes, resistors, that time bomb known as the selenium rectifier, align the bands, and eventually enjoy. All you guys really do amaze me.
When I was a kid in the 1980's I once built a project that did this with dripping water through 2 rings. Over time (sometimes took a few minutes depending on humidity) it jumped across a 3mm needle gap, so a few kV at least (didn't have HV meter at the time). Pretty inefficient compared to a Van de Graaff generator, but never wore out since the only moving part is water. Looks like there's some capacitance getting discharged in that arc, so it bites a bit harder than a doorknob and feet rubbing on a carpet. I sure wouldn't want to try it with 10 Joule or more worth (ie 3000v and 2.2uF), good chance of getting killed. Even 0.5J (250kV 14pF from a VDG) hurts quite a bit. I've never seen it happen with snow, but I guess whether the water is frozen or not doesn't matter much as far as physics is concerned.
the 14pF at 250kV might have only 0.5J, but will push a LOT of current because of the really high voltage (this is why it hurts a lot). Personally I'd rather take my chances with the 250kV as the pulse will be much sharper and shorter then with a 2.2uF at 3kV...longer pulse = greater chance of stopping the heart, not sure if skin effect comes into play with these discharges as well.
Kelvin's thunderstorm! I still want to build a steam jet version, don't know if that would work.
got shocked by a 6 joule (7kv) electric fence a few times. your whole arm jumps and goes a bit numb.
@@ancapftw9113
Speaking of an electric fence.
Well I used to stay on a farm.
The the pigs kept escaping through the fence.
Just friends rails on posts.
Wood.
They've squeezed right through.
We had an old battery powered electric fence charger the type it would run off like a 12 volt battery.
So we decided to put up an electric fence.
We were installing the insulators and wire on the fence. On metal post.
Sharon T post.
The battery was disconnected but one lead was still connected to either the positive or negative from a 12-volt battery.
I was putting the wire on an insulator.
I don't remember if I was touching the post at the time or not or do I get to my feet I was wearing shoes at the time of course.
I think it was like four or four and a half kill volt electric fence hard to say.
But the wire got bumped and brushed against the positive or negative the one that wasn't connected at the time.
long enough to to activate fence controller.
I jumped like a mile.
Remember that one time Weaver setting the pigs off the slaughter.
And a hand a hot shot cattle prod.
One of the pigs went underneath the guy's leg he lost his balance.
and happening get when the other guys is that was helping us.
to his rear end on his back.
business shirt happened to be to the side.
and when he was falling because the Pig going between his legs.
he happened to pull the trigger on the cattle prod.
the other guy got the full brunt of the of the cattle prod.
Needless to say there is another person that well Roundup well...
up getting Zapped afterwards.
@@AKAtheA Skin effect on human skin is mostly a myth. It's really only significant with good conductors (metals). With a human being the conductor RF and short-pulse currents actually prefer blood vessels and nerves (higher conductivity once the skin is burned through than fat and muscle). I once did a simulation assuming 100kHz from a CW tesla coil or ferrite transformer and a skin depth on actual skin was something like 5 feet (=basically nonexistent since no one is 10 feet wide), and even 100MHz was several inches assuming the voltage was 500V or more (enough to burn through skin) so skin effect probably wouldn't save you, it just makes you cook longer before you notice since it tends to destroy nerves as it preferably moves across them. Now with lightning strikes it's a bit different, most of the energy goes around the person rather than through them (otherwise they would not only certainly die every time but explode where they stood like a small tree) since plasma is a better conductor than human bodies, and with 100MV corona is all over you down to your feet right before you get struck. And yes given the same energy I would definitely prefer the 250kV over 1kV if I had to pick one for the reasons you stated.
I really appreciate the love for electronics you share Mr Carlson. I started watching your channel 3 years ago and have a gathered a wealth of knowledge. I fixed a popcorn machine today and I'm damn proud. Thank you again
Show us your antenna's set up's. Plz.
What kind you have, what there used for, which one was the one hooked up at the time of the arcing.
I (Radiofun232, YT user) am interested in that question too, also the exact time when the arcing happened, part of the day, wind conditions, the type of snow (snowstorm), the wiring into the radio shack, + the schematic of the antenna construction and the radio (basics of course, especially the power supply part) and the way it was connected to the mains supply).
He told you in the video that it was a center fed (extremely) long wire for LF-MF SWR radio reception. He only had the center feed wire of the coax connected to the old tube AM radio at the tuning input cap. This is why it's so important to have a DC grounded antenna, then this discharge will go to the ground rod through the loading coil.
@@rolomaticz5009 OK, my idea is that the antenna is/was charged by frictional electricity, caused by the snow, pushed by the wind. But the snow (weather situation) must have been dry in that case. And with frictional electricity both positive and negative charge can be caused, depends on the materials. So that is why I am/was interested in the whole electric setup.
Yes! We want pictures. Videos. Yes, antennas are a much videoed topic. But we have never seen the details of how the Master Electronics Carlson does it!
I think you have two air gaps breaking down microseconds apart. The chassis is isolated, so the incoming static electricity is charging what in effect is a parasitic capacitor between the chassis and its surroundings. It's very cold outside so the humidity is low. The voltage on the chassis will steadily increase until it flashes to ground through the path of least resistance, which I suspect is the air gap between the primary and secondary windings of the isolation transformer. Once the accumulated static charge dumps to ground, the potential between the chassis and the coax instantly jumps from zero to several thousand volts. This risetime is so fast that the inductor blocks the inrush current forcing it to take another path to the chassis. That path is the narrow air gap between the coax and the radio chassis. You have inadvertently created a relaxation oscillator.
About 50 years ago at WFEA, Manchester, New Hampshire, I saw the same phenomena of arcing in the open wire feed line. When we opened the switch to the line at the transmitter end we had 6” arcs across the knife switch. Lasted for several hours.
@@poiuuy533 Do you have the HAARP testing schedule!
Steven Bates It was 1964
I really enjoyed reading everyone's comments below--Great Stuff!
Smartest RUclips channel on earth by far.
When I was young I traveled a lot on train with my mom, and sometimes when we waited for the train and it was raining, our umbrellas would start giving us shocks. That was probably because the raindrops captured charge from the HV wires and carried it not only down but sideways for several meters, and deposited it on the umbrellas.
Maybe you don't have HV lines near but the snowflakes may have charge just by friction - or maybe they carry charge all the way down from the clouds and this is like a micro thunderstorm during winter.
I "heard" the effects of static build up /discharge on an old VW bug during an approaching thunderstorm tornado. The Bendix radio in that car had a little neon lamp across the antenna center coax lead to chassis. The radio would squeal in a rising pitch until the lightening would flash, then the squeal fell silent, only to start a new. I can only imagine that neon lamp was glowing away creating some sort of oscillation. Atmospheric/Global /Space Weather is an odd thing.
Very cool topic, thanks for creating and sharing this video
Neon lamps have a region of negative differential resistance, which can cause them to amplify or oscillate.
@@jordanrodrigues8265 I remember building a "relaxation" code practice oscillator using a Ne-2 neon lamp. I was not exactly sure about the physics but they are very interesting.
Great story! 33kV / cm in dry air to get an arc. You must have had a good storm. I saw this as a child. Arcing was occurring across a PL259 connector for my father's CB radio antenna. The antenna was a fiberglass coaxial-type vertical and was ungrounded. I can't explain why you were getting an arc across 36 ohms. Weird unless you had RF and a reactance that blocked the 36 ohms from shunting the current. I look forward to more depth on this one. Thanks!!
Are you saying the connector was attached to the antenna and nothing else and it was arching?
In a snow storm? Or a regular storm?
@@Drottninggatan2017 Yes. Only connected to antenna with other end in free air. It was windy and there may have been a storm approaching. This was in 1970's.
Great video as always! I observed the same phenomenon in my shack last year. I heard what sounded like a clicking sound and tracked it down to the power supply that powered the 2m rig. The clicking sound was a discharge from the common mode power filter to chassis ground. I disconnected the antenna from the radio and the discharge stopped. The outside weather was windy and very dry, no snow or rain. My conclusion was static buildup on the antenna and discharging through the power supply. As you observed, there was no damage to the radio or to the power supply.
We make concessions for precision and resolution. Over a decade and a half as an RF bench engineer and this is a fun thought project. Are the labs built to R56 or similar standard? Have you tested the quality of your line voltage and grounds? I've seen highly charged air and mediocre grounds clash in expensive ways like this, especially if you throw in distant lightning strikes. It's just enough sometimes to cause unshielded ICs to internally become something different forever and let the games begin. This is an interesting one and will be following along as usual! Thank you for sharing!
awesome work as per usual. also may i add, one of the only people where it pays to be a patron member. big thumbs up
I can guarantee you now that you have the setup to catch this it will NEVER happen again.
Thank you, Mr. Murphy :)
Back in 1987, I had a an assembly of dipole antennas for each band connected to a single coax. These antennas were hanging high above the roof of the eight floor building I lived in at the time. I always disconnected the coax connector from my Hamradio transceiver when I was not using it. One day during an approaching rainstorm, I heard the same kind of clicking noise which increased in intensity as the storm was approaching and I discovered an arc forming between ground and the center pin of the PL259 connector. The same thing would happen wintertime at low temperatures when it was snowing. I made sure to stay away from the cable when this was happening. Greetings from Sweden.
I live on a hilltop in NY State and in the winter I keep my antennas grounded when snow storms pass through.
Twenty years ago I heard arcing during a storm and traced it to a multiple band coax switch and realized the floating inputs from the 75 meter antenna was arcing inside of it. Very interesting. Back in the 70's in another QTH, I was in the process of disconnecting my antennas during a sudden thunder storm and had arcs jumping across the PL 259 connection while I removed it from a coax switch.
Mother Nature likes to surprise us every now and then. Thankfully in my case not fatally, so far.
Had this happened to anybody else I would have dismissed it without a thought. Thanks for taking the time to capture the event. Looking forward to your analisis.
you may want to check your isolation transformer as it may be damaged by the arcing.
the arcing could burn off the varnish on the windings and cause them to short.
the driver in the led bulb is what is damaged.
if you take the bulb apart and connect a 50 volt source from a battery to the led board they should work fine.
i have had a couple of led bulb go bad and cycle on and off and so when i tear down the bulb and remove the driver and then series a few 9 volt batteries to the led it lights ok.
I was part of a team of 100 re-imaging the subsurface of the Alaskan north slope oil field in 1992. We were working in the lab (trailer on skis pulled by a cat) when we were hit with a blizzard at around 50 below Fahrenheit. We had cables that had analog pairs that would bring back signal from our sensors. During the storm the 45 mph wind was blowing snow horizontally across our cables. The static protection in the cables interconnects included gas tubes which would light at about 60 volts. These tubes were lit up like a Christmas tree. At those temperatures there is little or no humidity. In the course of that winter we did also see ball lightning, which I understand is very rare to sight.
When a young fellow listening to shortwave radio in Manitoba in winter blizzard on my Heathkit GR91 on a bare copper longwire antenna I experienced what I thought was static electricity snapping quite loudly quite ofen. Radio kept working. May be the same scenario. Don from your Patreon site.
This reminds me of a weird night about 30 years ago. It involved my CB radio aerial and coax. We had been having a few storms during that autumn, and I had disconnected my CB aerial as a precaution against lightning strikes. A few weeks later, and still disconnected, the plug on the end of my CB coax began sparking, very much as you see in this video. A very steady and regular tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, and looking very much like the kind of spark you'd expect from a car's plug leads, held about a quarter inch from grounded metal. The gap between the parts where the spark was jumping was about 3/8". There was nothing connected to the aerial or coax, and the aerial was a loaded dipole, that's to say both the driven pole, and the ground pole (tied to coax braid) had loading coils to tune them for use at 27MHz. The aerial was mounted vertically at the regulation maximum of 21ft above ground, and was mounted atop a wooden pole which was in turn mounted on top of a steel mast.
Weather conditions were heavy fog and very light breeze - the kind of fog you can see moving horizontally.
Naturally, I didn't stick my fingers on the end of the plug to see how lively it was, but it was fair cracking out those sparks. I had to be up for work next morning so I was more concerned about bed than faffing around to investigate this odd phenomenon, so I cautiously hefted the coax out through the window and left it at that. I've never seen it happen again.
Chopper pilots know this all too well!
Hey, remember that scene from Red October.
Best part about this is now having a proper interface to some real lab equipment. This is fascinating. Thanks for including us in the mystery and how to perhaps quantify and explain it. 36 Ohms to ground is basically ground.
As far as DC is concerned yes it is. The inductance of the coil shows that it had high frequency AC on it at the moment of discharge.
Excellent video
Pecipitation Static (or P-static) is what you were experiencing. I know it well like many others. It is a high voltage near zero current charge that builds on antenna due to precipitation or other small particles in the air. The reason for the snap is that your coax acts like a high voltage capacitor and builds up charge. The charge is from the particles which cause a pulsing charge for each particle hitting the antenna. Even though you had 35 Ohms DC to the chassis the pulsing DC is more like broad band arc noise. Simple arc style lightning or charge arrestor will prevent this. You can also install what are known as "porcupine" or "maple leaf" style static dissipator that reduce this effect. You may have noticed many on commercial towers and tall structures.
High voltage can get very weird very fast! My guess is that the capacitor is flashing over, and the fast pulse doesn't go via the inductor. Path to ground is unclear, probably the isolation transformer, or perhaps the mat is bleeding away charge to ground, or its flashing over the insulation on the line cord, since it looks like you have those wires crossing over!
I have seen something like that in a TV broadcast antenna. We found out that there was a Voltage buildup and when the Voltage reached about 30K Volt, it could jump over relays that were switched off. When it then arced over, it could also arc around components. I was new at that moment so did not understand much of it but it looked much like you showed.
Oh, I had similar happen on a coax cable leading to a large CB antenna. There were storms nearby and I disconnected the coax cable from the CB base station. A little while later I started hearing a pop every couple seconds, and found a spark jumping from the center to the shield. I think the antenna was picking up static from the air.
My experience exactly!
Back around 1976, I was driving home on the highway on a summer night. There were storms brewing around but it wasn't storming or raining where I was. I kept hearing this clicking about every second or so. It took me a bit but I finally figured out it was coming from my in dash stereo. The unit had a trim cap on the front for tweaking in the antenna. The noise was an arc coming from the trim cap. I could see a flash every time I heard the snap. Needless to say I reached in the back and unplugged the antenna. Didn't affect the radio luckily.
Had that happen across a coax connector that I'd disconnected because a storm was approaching. Very loud arcs!
Same here. Happened at a friend's place as well while a thunderstorm was approaching.
Had this on a car Ariel during a very dry day in the desert. No cumulous.
No in the desert the air was still. It was a low pressure area coming through. Apparently there is a normal altitude / voltage profile. It must have been pumped right up.
One of the things that the old 1930's Radio guys used to do when building a big antenna system was to include a spark-gap on the outside of their radio shack where the antenna was fed in, one side of the spark-gap was connected to the antenna, the other end was connected to a long copper or brass rod that was driven into the ground.
I hope you megger out that isolation Transformer, you know an isolation Transformer with a short to ground is very pointless :-)
It could be just fine. Is that a conductive antistatic mat the radio chassis was sitting on? If so, we have all kinds of possible paths to ground.
@@Fourcycle Good observation. There are possibly critical details in this event that need to be noted and modeled before our speculations here can be checkable. I've noted others have pointed out quality of AC line grounds to his home as a possible concern, and Carlson's video didn't explain the situation of the coax from the antenna to the radio unambiguously from an mateur radio operator's perspective, e.g. were the usual RF/lightning/AC-safety grounds and safety measures applied at the point where the coax penetrates into the home/lab? Or, was it a single contiguous piece of coax from up at the wires in the air, to the BNC connector he attached his shield-lifting pigtail to? (which somehow seems like a bad idea, esp. in retrospect)
Gameboygenius nailed it. Just because you were observing an arc in the radio does not mean that was the primary source. Very likely, as the antenna was charging due to the snowfall, that it eventually arced to ground somewhere. Either across the dipole legs, to a support structure, or even inside the BNC connector. When it discharged the input side of the radio’s blocking capacitor changed from being at several thousand volts to near zero in nanoseconds thus causing the secondary arc you observed and also explains how it could establish such a high voltage across the 36 ohm resistor without it going up in smoke.
Neon bulb across antenna input might help mitigate this, perhaps. I've seen neon bulbs in old cb radios near back rf section.
They are mounted in Sailor ship radio equipment, as spark gap in the antenna line. to prevent damage. (Thunderstorms, and this.)
also used to verify that the finals are working
This neon is a common trick (it needs to handle transmit voltages as well of course, or be disconnected for transmit.). Another is to put about 10 or more MegOhms of resistance to ground to bleed off the static buildup from snow or wind.
I worked as a cable line technician near the CFRB radio towers... I came across situations like this quite often... and during diagnostics we decided to double ground every piece of equipment to try and eliminate the rf energy. This energy was enough to cause burns from touching metal amps dist taps, cables including grounds... It was the greatest learning experience in career...
This is a very known fenomen here in Norway, by us ham's! The best from LB1NH Arild in Oslo Norway.
Would you care to describe the phenomenon (and its cause)?
@@edinfific2576 Yes. it is aproxemently what happens in thunderstorms, but in less scale. The snowflakes hit the antennawire, and makes static electrisy up to 2-3 Kv. But very little amps. You wil not die by getting this voltage in Your fingers, but you will feel it very hard! (Sorry for my English). As you are in a hotell, walk on a blanket, and push the elevator knob. Maybe you have some experience With that? Or going out of a car, touch the ground, and then are near some of the metal on the car afterwords? Hope you understood me there Edin! LB1NH Arild
@@gamlemann53 Thank you. I understood enough.
If there was a 30 or so ohm resistor between your body and the ground while you were walking on the carpet, I doubt any charge would build up. Please try another explanation.
@@gamlemann53 Thank you. It is now even more clear to me.
Interesting video. My dad was a ham radio guy and I remember him always attaching a heavy ground clip onto his main antenna whenever he wasn't working. The ground clip went directly to a rod driven into the earth outside the house. Don't know if that saved him any damage from snow static along the way.
It may also be related to the dust content in the air at that moment. It is a known phenomenon. Search for dust triboelectric charge. In serious storm, dust may charge up to 15 kV in dry conditions.
In US one must look for Peoria Loess dust releases which usually occur in winter time.
I wondered about carbon particulates myself but good old dust of course
You, and many others, are missing the fact that there was a 30 or so ohm resistance between the capacitor and ground, through the coil. This should earth the antenna and prevent any static build up on it, unless it's some AC or RF phenomenon that interacts with the reactance of the coil and capacitor in the radio.
@@tasmedic Would you care pointing the time where Paul says that the antenna was grounded? At 3:54 he clearly states that the antenna was not grounded.
@@ciprianpopa1503 My bad. However both sides of the antenna were outside. so both would have developed a similar charge, with one leg being connected to the chassis of the radio, and the other to the antenna socket. No net potential between chassis and antenna means no current flow. Your turn....
Also please point out where Paul says there was a dust storm. I think he said there was a snow storm but I can't be bothered to trawl through the video to find the exact time.
Even if there WAS a static potential between the antenna socket and the chassis, please explain how an electrostatic charge could build up when the resistance between chassis and the coil connected to the antenna socket is around 30 ohms.
@@tasmedic So my turn then. Dust raises always in front of a weather front, termed haboob (from Arab language) due to their frequency in the hot desert areas. A snow storm is a dry event that can sometimes produce a snow haboob which raises dust ahead of its path if it encounters a dust source.
Paul indeed said in was a snow storm and I hypothesised a potential cause for the discharges he presented here, and I expanded my reasoning above. Your turn now.
And P.S. I am not supposed to explain anything, I just named a possibility, and whatever you are claiming the Paul's setup was during the recorded event has to be confirmed by Paul only, otherwise we are only in the realm of suppositions.
Where are you Mr.Carlson?need more of your brilliance in electronica
I bet your antennas form a "Kelvin water dropper" static electricity generator.
Yes, but the radio was connected via isolation transformer. How was the circuit closed to ground?
John, very interesting comment.
@@movax20h If the isolation transformer is of the 3 prong grounded type on the primary, my guess would be the ground prong is grounded to the transformer laminated core. The transformer would easily arc from the secondary to the core. Not likely for a 2 prong version to arc from the primary to the secondary winding, unless the neutral side is connected to the core as well. That is my guess.
@@zulumax1 yeah. It depends how it is weird. Sometimes ground is shared , sometimes is not, Or it might be some isolation failure.
@@movax20h the isolation transformer acted like a capacitor
I admit that after seeing this video, I was intrigued and gave this some thoughts... My current theory is that there was another spark in the isolation transformer as you mentioned: The sequence is that the chassis is charged up through the 36ohm resistance (coil) until the breakdown voltage for the isolation transformer is reached. Once the spark in the isolation transformer is ignited, the chassis voltage is pulled closer to ground (due to the lower resistance of the ionized air in the spark). The coil connecting the chassis to the antenna has a relatively low DC impedance (36ohm), but at high frequency, the impedance is probably relatively high, so the chassis voltage can be pulled lower even though the antenna voltage is still high. There's probably enough charge/capacitance in the antenna to initiate a spark in the radio once the chassis voltage has been pulled down enough... A few points that comes from this theory: 1) The spark in the isolation transformer must require a higher breakdown voltage than the spark in the radio otherwise there would be no sparking in the radio, and 2) The coil is absolutely necessary for this effect to occur: the chassis needs to be charged through a "low" resistance, then when the spark in the isolation transformer is initiated, this resistance must go high very quickly (basically, the textbook definition of the behavior of an inductor), 3) I haven't grasped how exactly to fit the capacitor into this theory: There could actually be some RF/ringing effect... In any case, this is fascinating, and I would never had thought that a simple snowfall could cause this much power to be developed across an antenna (now I'm also wondering just how common this is?)
NugTrace , If its tho snow ❄️ causing high voltage then does that not mean there are various types of metals in the snow.
I know nothing about these RF stuff, but by googling I found a claim: _"Class-Y safety capacitors are designed to fail open."_
If that is the case, your *capacitor* still *might be broken.*
one of my favorite videos Sir...hope to see more on this in the future...thanks
I guess I’m more impressed than surprised‽
Are you comfortable sharing the aprox time, zone and date of this occurrence, if you haven’t already?
Clearly some kind of triboelectric phenomenon perhaps between the dry snow and the dipole elements or an atmospheric high voltage differential between the clouds and the ground?
Ditto.
What a neat feature you've discovered! Your FADA receiver can double as a spark gap transmitter in a snow storm! If I were you, I'd be grounding the entire outdoor array whenever you see a big atmospheric pressure drop. If you need an antenna in these conditions, use an indoor loop instead!
You remind me of the professor from Gilligan’s Island
Yes, yes, yes, I knew he reminded me of someone.
? Is a fictional character a someone ?
OverUnity7734 I’d say so. Yes I couldn’t put my finger on it at first either and then it just clicked.
Yes, he has a video where he builds a radio out of coconuts!
Professor Roy Hinkle, graduate from Coconuts University!
Can build a nuclear reactor out of a coconut but can't fix a hole in a boat. C'est la vie.
Thank you! You are in my top 5!
Quite a few years ago, I had a similar occurrence. Where I live, I need an antenna amp, a good antenna and coax lead in to receive decent broadcast tv reception. One very cold night during a snowstorm, reception went to pot. Suspecting the amp, I disconnected the coax from the amp, and I can confirm that yes, that _hurt_. (Yep, I got zapped.) Every few seconds a spark would jump from the center wire to the f connector ring. Really weird. And yes, I had to get a new antenna amp.
I hope the your antenna amp is a tube amp, not a transistor amp. Tubes are mechanically frail and inefficient and huge (they are made of glass) and they can break easily, but ELECTRICALLY they are extremely rugged. An overvoltage situation would cause temporary arcing between the grids and the cathode and plate, which is nothing more than some tiny burn marks which are not a problem. But a transistor would be irreversably ZAPPED instantly, even high-powered power transistors! Transistors can handle large amounts of power, but getting out of there specifications for even a fraction of a second would zap them. Maybe that's why the Russians insisted on using tube radios in their military aircraft during the Cold War during the Soviet Union days.
(I am commenting on my own comment): I forgot to add one more thing: the issue of EMP's. EMP's (electromagnetic pulses) can damage solid-state devices much more easily than vacuum tube devices. We must be very vigilant about our computer-controlled power grid, people with implantable devices like pacemakers and cell phones and tablets. Unfortunately, it is impossible to make computers with present technology that don't employ solid-state devices. Our technology is EXCELLENT, we just have to be very careful.
I had the same snapping sound in my shack (Last century!). I hunted it down and it was an older Swan VHF radio with a TX/RX relay. I had a VHF antenna on top of a 50 foot tower in a snow storm connected to the radio. It was arcing across the relay.
As to your coil/capacitor issue, consider the ignition system in an old car. They had a coil and a condenser, a capacitor. The breaker points would pull 12 volts through the coil, building up a magnetic field, then opened the circuit. The condenser allowed enough time for the points to open without completely discharging the magnetic field through the points. The points, if improperly adjusted, would go bad from the arcing.
What happens is the field is trying to collapse and will build up whatever voltage it needs to jump a spark. The arc is a sign of voltage, not current. The higher the voltage, the longer distance the arc. In the car ignition, the 12 volt side is attempting to jump an .018 inch gap. But the high voltage side of the coil sees a .035 inch gap easier to jump at around 10,000 volts. So it arcs at the spark plug instead of the points.
It doesn't mean your capacitor is bad. It means it is blocking the current allowing the field to build up in the coil until it can jump the gap to the chassis. If you have seen lightning in a snow storm, the energy is coming from the charged snow hitting your antenna looking for ground.
This is why I always unplug my antennas when I'm not using my radios.
I am surprised that there aren't that many people using neon bulbs from both sides of the antenna to earth-ground. We used to do that years ago to drain the DC picked up by the antenna. There are many weather conditions that can build up a static charge on an antenna. Having the physical disconnecting equipment for storms is very wise.
That's not a bad idea, and it would make it pretty!
And what you'd really wanna do is not simply unplug the coax, but short the center to the shield at that end, then connect that to station earth ground.
@@AmishSpecialForces In stormy conditions, anyway! I wonder, if both sides the the coax are going thru gas-discharge tubes to station earth, in that state can you still use the antenna on the radio for RX (simple enough to check) or TX (more doubtful about that one)?
@@atsdroid precisely what a proper disconnect switch would do. Double pole double throw. All earth-ground in one position, all antenna in the other.
Mr. Carlson, two things came to mind about the phenomena: 1) What were the humidity levels outside at the time and in your lab? IIRC, low humidity is conducive to static electricity. One thing I've heard our local meteorologists here in New Jersey mention is "dry snow". 2) Could any sort of magnetic field have been present at the time creating a sort of transformer effect? I'm quite a novice in all these fields, but I figured I'd share my thoughts. Thanks for sharing your experience.
I had this happen to me twice here in Arizona. I had a end fed long wire up about 20 ft and about 70 ft in length. The (shack side) antenna end wasn't connected to anything just close to a piece of metal drywall corner strip and it started to tick.. tick .. tick (HV arcs) between the antenna wire and the metal strip while I was sitting here. The clouds over head looked lower than usual and very angry looking. I haven't had noticed anything similar with the hustler vertical. And I got rid of the long wire.
Good Job Mr. Carlson I always enjoy your youtube show
Paul, I was curious about the antenna. Is it grounded, and is it grounded to the breaker box? I was asked to correct my ground to meet code requirements.
This is AMAZING! THANKS SO MUCH!
You can have thunder and lightning during a snow storm, so the atmosphere gets charged up. You are an electronic Benjamin Franklin.
When I lived in northern IL we called it thundersnowing. Saw it happen many times. Really cool to watch! I don't miss the below zero temps up there lol!
Back in Missouri, we had a teacher describe what your talking about, except he had no antenna, what he had was lighting rods on top of his house. And the Cable (#0 ???) running down the side of the house would glow RED from the current being taken off the the lighting rod spikes during the winter- no snow, just really cold outside and windy. It would have been interesting if you could use one of your scopes to catch RF from the spark.
1:36 ...... " I got zapped by the coax " .......ALRIGHT ........Mr. Electro BOOM Carlson !!!!!!! Subscribed ..........
Thanks Mr. C. As always, very interesting. Thanks for the video.
Glad you enjoyed George!
Snow creates a positive charge. The electric current was traveling out your antenna not into it.
Not at the voltages he was seeing.
IF I WOULD SAY SERENDIPITY...I COULDENT BE MORE HAPPY TO HERE A STORY LIKE THAT ,THANKS FOR SHARING MR CARLSON
When I saw you reach up and pull that service module out of the o-scope, I was flabbergasted. I always thought that view of you sitting in your lab was a blue-screen like montage. LOL. P.S. As to your arcing issue, you might have heard that gravitational waves are being emitted by the giant star Betelgeuse and may indicate it is about to go supernova. Coincidence? I think not! LOL^2
I hope you are joking about the Betelgeuze and the arcing.
I’ve seen something similar at an AM broadcast station I was working at.
It looked like we were going to get some rain and I noticed the transmitter meters briefly jump at random.
I found the cause at the antenna.
There was a chain of sparks jumping the insulators on all three of the top guy wires.
Fascinating and more than a little bit terrifying.
It stopped when the rain started.
The transmitter never did go off the air.
Could the rise time of, or the frequencies in, the arcs, be sufficiently high to have little current through the coil of the tube radio?
It might be congruent with the signal passing through the capacitor, perhaps.
Agreed, that coil will have high impedance at RF.
Yes very fast rise time, not frequency.
@@Very_Dark_Engineer Please recall arcs are used in the old-time spark gap radio transmitters and Tesla coils for an RF source. In addition, a fast rise time consists of multiple higher frequencies, sine waves, per Fourier analysis.
I can see the conversation with the insurance adjuster and his response, "SOooooo, you're saying your garage burned down because of the snow." Your response can now be, "Have you NOT SEEN Mr. Carlson's Lab on RUclips!"
Aircraft aerosol geoengineering contains heavy metal particles. Cloud seeing uses aluminum, barium, strontium and silver iodide. Combined with high powered output from scatter radar, the natural environment is becoming increasingly ionized.
youtuber DUTCHSINSE covers this very extensively
You truly have a God-given talent and knowledge that we are all the better for having observed. I plan to join your Patreon site this month (I do not join Patreon sites) and start the electronics videos. Hopefully, it's for old dummies like me.
Oh no !! Some mad scientist at the HAARP facility is doing crazy experiments again ;)
And making publicly available scientific papers on their findings as required by law. HAARP is not a secret facility.
1) Be sure you tighten the knob on your Tek scope so the module does not slide out! Making me nervous!
2) The precipitation static from the snow is wideband random EM noise. The 36 ohm resistance of the coil is not draining much energy, instead the inductance and capacitance of the circuit are resonant to some of that WB noise and therefore the voltage is building until the little "Spark Gap" flashes over. I had a ground plane CB antenna years ago and during a snow storm I could light a neon bulb across the PL259 terminals of the coax. You have sort of a mini Tesla coil thing going on in the radio.
3) You need to ground that feedline and install a Polyphaser gas discharge lightning protector. Check all the wiring into your labs to make sure you don't have a serious lightning damage situation in the future. Motorola R56 is an excellent source for grounding and bonding recommendations. Polyphaser also publishes white papers on the subject.
It takes 100,000 volts to start an arc across a 1 inch air gap. Every time you ground a lighting strike you only get rid of 1/10 of the voltage. The average lighting strike is 5 miles that is a lot of voltage and it has enough amperage to melt sand into glass.
I seem to remember 35kv to cover an inch gap. Let's see what google says. Quora says 75kv so it looks like we split the difference. Of course it will vary with conditions.
Actually it's a lot less than that, and depends on electrode shape and air humidity. Did you get that 100kV per inch figure from a stun gun?
@@uK8cvPAq no it came from an electronics class with a live demonstration sugest you check your facts
Perhaps conditions were right for a tree branch (or dirty insulator) to intermittently arc to a nearby power line? This would create a spark gap transmitter, with your antenna capturing enough energy to manifest as arcing in your receiver?
Alternatively, conditions were such that your antenna was accumulating each tiny charge from the snowflakes, until breakdown occurred.
In either case, the impedance of the coil was likely to be far greater than the DC value; short duration “transient” spikes could see the cap as a short and the coil as an open, possibly allowing for the voltage to build rapidly to the level where it would cause cause arcing to the chassis.
If you figure it out, please make another video. And thank you for the wonderful work you do!
What an interesting video to have dinner with 😋😋
I had this happen to me. I heard the noise first like you. After a lot of head scratching we disconnected the coax from the radio. The sound followed the coax. Looking into the end of the connector you could see a purple light behind the phenolic center conductor insulator. By holding the insulated part of the cable we discharged it to a doorknob. Center conductor to knob. Nice spark! It was snow.
Was there a CME or solar flare event on the sun during or before the event?
This type of thing is usually related to purely atmospheric weather instead of space weather. Has to do with wind (sometimes aided by dust or precipitation) or even just precipitation forcing the normal flow of current within the atmosphere to grow in magnitude. It's why connecting any electronics _directly_ to an antenna is bad design.
This is amazing, if i recall correctly from a Richard Feynman book, that every meter or so up is like 100k volts up into the atmosphere. so possibly the snow is still charged with high voltage from the outer atmosphere and conveys that to whatever it touches, but you need to collect the static from a lot of snow to notice it. just an idea.
70 volts per meter is more like it. Thet's 2x10^6 to 3x10^6 volts to the top of the atmosphere.
Professor your lab looks more like the inside of a 1950/60s TV made Space Ship without a view screen. (Grins) But how do you have room to work on anything in that tight space?
I mean, there’s even camera & defff other extra recording equipment you can’t see (obviously...) that takes up even *more* room/space than what you already imagine... and he has hundreds of videos literally showing himself working in this very shop you described/mentioned (?)...
He has room to work cuz he is organized and just makes it work..?
Sorry, your observation is interesting (working in a small shop is difficult and organization is *paramount*.. what Mr. Carlson accomplishes in this shop *is amazing*) it’s just the question that followed your observation is defff a bit of a head scratcher for me.. lol
@John Chrysostom Until about a year ago he did all the work at the desk behind him. There is a desk to his left he used for things like PCB etching. He has a video of both labs and the storage area next to Lab 2 somewhere in his video library. Pretty cool stuff.
I have noticed lots of similar arcing both from rain and snow into my antennas when I was a teen in the 70-80's , for instance my CB rig was a Lafayette HE-20T connected to a 1/4 GP and I had it in my room.
Sometimes I woke at night hearing this arcing sound from the the radio when it was heavy snow or rain weather outside.
When I removed the PL-259 from the radio I noticed sparcs between the shield and pin, jumping up to 10 mm so it may be 10-25 kV static charge in the antenna.
Even heavy wind will charge antennas, the solution is to use DC grounded antennas.
Thanks Paul! Maybe Tesla is haunting you. :)
Morse code from the ether! Time to playback that sparking sequence!
In broadcast engineering, we use inductors from AM towers to ground. The towers are hot, but the inductors are high impedance at RF, but they generally bleed static charges off BEFORE there is an arc. My point on your experience: strange.
Wow Paul, that's nuts buddy.
I wonder if it is a similar effect as in the video Veritasium did a while back titled "Sparks from Falling Water: Kelvin's Thunderstorm"
Ah, you sabed me ghe trouble! :)
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing!
LOL.....
H.A.R.P.
;)
Nah, simple static accumulation, complicated by some part or another of his radio setup. The snow is a dead giveaway, as would be a sandstorm, and maybe simple high winds. They all force the charge accumulation rate higher than normal.
Gotta love the scopemeter. I all but lusted after one of those as a geeky teen and then decades later realised "you're an adult, you've got disposable income, have one if you want!" It's got 101 flaws, but it's still a lovely bit of kit.
Boy! It's 'snow-wonder' that arc was happening. I paused the video at every arc and noticed that each one looked different. So it's true that no two arcs are the same.
I would get arcing at my pl-259 connectors (disconnected from switches) from my 40m verticals during snow, or even before a summer storm. Would light up behind the teflon dielectric of the fitting. A great teaching moment for the grandkids.
I have seen (and heard) similar arcing happen on a disconnected antenna cable. My brother had a big antenna on the roof and at that moment nothing connected to it. we started hearing this sort of clicking noise and after searching for it for a while we found out it was arcing from the core to the shield at the connector.making this very audible "click" noise. And yes it was heavy snowfall at the time. This happened in the early eighties and i had forgotten about it. This video reminded me of that happening.
Thanks Paul, this just goes to prove that Tesla was right that the planet is buzzing with free atmospheric electricity waiting to be tapped into and an antenna is one way to obtain it, the higher the antenna the stronger the voltage, although it is not very strong, obviuos.y the snow moving throgh the air was creating a higher charge, fascinating very enjoyable, cheers Paul, always a pleasure watching your stuff.