We used florescent light tubes to peak tune the final radio frequency output tube on a commercial AM radio station back in the 1980s. The brighter the flash, the more signal was being delivered to our antenna.
We had a floursecent tube at the top of our transmitter tower 40 meters high at the boys scouts when a jota jamboree on the air was held to warm us not to climb the tower... We where only allowed to sit in a net several meters above ground in the tower made of wooden beams... The warning was quite visible contact even with Australia from the Netherlands under the right atmosphere conditions.. professional radia ham people who for once could go all out in power since at jota time no limits seemed to be there as long as you knew what you where doing...
We did that in the 80's when us teens all had cb radios in our cars...the guys who had "boosted" radios could light them up pretty bright by the antenna on the trunk
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A saw a group of radio engineers do a rough tune on a 5 tower transmitter site that phased the towers where 1 or 2 would be hot and 3 or 4 would be grounded to make the tower array directional.. They setup a whole bunch of tubes hanging from tall wooden poles about 100 feet away from the towers in a circle around them.. Then by switching which towers were hot and which were grounded you could easily see that some tubes were bright and others were dim.. A few days later we took a truck with an extendable antenna and a field strength meter and drove to somewhere around 50 places on the map taking readings day and night when they had the antennas setup different ways.. The matching coils on those AM stations that I saw attached to a whole row of amplifier cabinets were huge and made out of copper tubing that was 1/2 inch to 1 inch diameter and 4 foot across.. This was very different compared to the VHF FM transmitters that were just a couple small rack mount exciters connected to one 6 foot tall amp cabinet..
Back in the 80's we ran a permanent electric fence around a large farm I was working for. Part of that fence ran under some large power lines coming from a power plant and once that fence was insulated it was hot without being connected to a charger.
@@chadw100 Yes, electric fences are by definition insulated at each post. In this case they were fiberglass posts 5 ft high with 6 strands of wire as opposed to more common "temporary" electric fences that are 2-3ft high with steel posts, plastic insulators and one or two wires.
3 ways to grab power leakage. Capacitive, just a long plate of copper insulated from ground, inductive, a bunch of rebar or similar wrapped with copper wire, or ion capture, an array of insulated spikes. The first gives the highest voltage. The second gives the most current. The third is highly dependant on weather.
so in the next video after this, with his coax cable fence experiment, that would be capacitive. I hope he will try one to demonstrate inductive. This is very interesting!
I want to clarify somethi g i see in a lot of the comments. Its not power that is just seeping away lost forever. When you introduce an inductive circuit next to another it creates a back emf and actually opposes the flow of current in the power line, thereby causing resistance and effectively taking power. Without the light bulb in place, the emf from the power line has no opposition and therefore doesnt see a resistance on the line.
EVERY ferrous object within range of the magnetic lines of flux creates an inductive load...EVERY ferrous object! Shed, fence, windmill, automobiles, are just a few. Not to mention if any of those objects are touching ground the object magnetized is discharging continuously to ground. I demonstrated this to my students on numerous occasions using a compass near high current load. The needle...pointed the load field. After a few moments the only ferrous part of the compass (which allows one end of the needle to point North) effectively became magnetized. The needle then pointed South, and remained this way for a few days.
Very interesting I was just about to ask the same thing. Would diamagnetic metals exhibit any load on the system? Say silver, it conducts electricity so supposedly the field would have some interaction with it no? I want to better understand relationship between induction and magnetism/circutry
@@Benpriebe314 current flow is the electrons moving along the conductor, outer shell of the atom to outer shell of another atom. Copper for example has one electron in it's outer shell, a good conductor, because it can move easily. Resistance is the materials opposition to that current flow. Inductance is the opposition to current flow as a result of impact on that magnetic field generated around that conductor during current flow. AC, the magnetic field collapses and expands each time the current changes direction. That impedes the change in direction of the electrons in the conductor. When ferrous material is near enough to the magnetic field, that metal becomes magnetized itself, generating it's own lines of Flux, magnetic field. This creates an added impedence to the current flow, making it harder to collapse the magnetic field each time electrons change direction. Analogy I used in class was an automobile. I start pushing it one way, voltage after a moment the car starts moving, electrons. Since our power here is 60hertz, the current changes direction 120 times a second. When I stop pushing, I run around and push from the opposite direction. Which way is the car still moving? After a moment, the car stops and starts moving the opposite direction. Resistance and inductance affects how fast the change in electron flow occurs. The lag in the change can be referred to as power factor. Another discussion, so much for the electrical theory rambling.
I'd parked my car under some very high voltage transmission lines in California right where the lines sagged. It was next to a creek running from a hot spring. I had gotten out of the water and sat on a small aluminum beach chair in the dirt next to my car. I touched my car and felt a pretty good voltage. Definitely made me pull back. It would have been interesting to measure the voltage with a meter but I didn't have one. The car was acting as part of a capacitor coupling through the air. There was a radio station in Hampton Virginia the early 80's called WPEX that put up fluorescent tubes on the tower so that it spelled out "X 15". It looked cool at night from Rt. 64. with the bulbs lit up from the RF of the antenna.
Thirty years ago I drove a clean garbage truck picking up recyclable cardboard. I was loading cardboard into my truck from a dumpster, which was positioned under large electrical wires. I mean LARGE. As I was doing this, my upper arm touched the dumpster, and I received a mild continuous shock. I can't imagine what that might do to people who actually live in houses situated under those wires.
When I was in the Navy back in the 70’s we used to strap fluorescent tubes near high powered radio sets when tuning up. The flickering lamp was a good indication we were transmitting. Also I rembet bring on a ship within 10 miles if a very high powered VLF transmitter and all the fluorescent lamps that were off would flash on and off.
Have a LED shop light light that never dims, think that might be the reason.
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My brother lived in Waianae not too far from the huge Navy ammo dump and the ULF transmitter site and he used to talk about the florescent lights flickering and some radio and TV reception problems when they were transmitting..
a CB Radio properly tuned can illuminate a Fluorescent tube pretty well, i've done it and scared a friend of mine half to death with the demo, with a Linear amp the light was full brightness end to end and plenty of light to read by, and we did something similar when i was in Vo-Tech, we had some high-tension lines that ran across the campus, our instructor had a PVC Pipe with a fitting that was the right size to clip a Flouro tube into and hold it up in the air, with the other end going to the ground with just a tent stake on the end of it, it was i want to say a 10 or 12 foot chunk of Schedule 40 PVC and that tube lit up, not super bright, but bright enough you could see in the daylight, so it is doable, and its crazy what kind of power radiates as RF from things we use day-to-day, also i mentioned the CB Radio/base station with the Fluro tube, you can do the same thing by standing near an AM Transmitting station, or a SW station, that'll light a tube pretty good from not that far away (~100yds)
I used to run a small tube on my antenna with a linear "heater" and it lit easily although it screwed up my SWR. I did hear tell of a guy who had a far bigger amp who lit a McDonalds sign accidently - his alternator was apparently NOT happy about the current draw! I also had an issue with an intercom system at a bank keying up to talk to someone while in line in my car - the teller was NOT pleased at the noise on her end 😲
I knew of a guy that used florescent lighting in all but the bedrooms of the house. He lived very close to an AM radio station. He used his TV antenna tower for the pickup point. It was very strange to see glowing tubes simply taped to the ceiling.
I might suggest, as a test, is to see how many meters of "fence" cable it takes to sufficiently test your lamps brightness,instead of the aluminum antenna.(10, 20, 30 meters) Also there are two contact points on each end of the lamps. Did you use antenna and ground on the same end when you tested them? Would a capacitor keep the lamps from flickering? It sounds as if you can do several experiments if you want! It is a unique lab you have!
After I sea kayaked off Alamitos Bay in Southern California I often went shopping at the Hawthorne Costco. Right behind the store are some high tension wires. I'd just wear my rubber wet suit, and rubber water shoes. I was a little damp, but not dripping. Pushing the shopping cart around the store about once every minute I get a real zap from the cart. A bit more than static electricity, but not dangerous.
Years ago I attended an electronics trade school, I remember the instructor pointing out the RF around power lines. He said you could actually take coils of wire and situate it under a power line, and you can/will produce electricity. You could even power your house just from what is being radiated into the air from the power line. BUT the electric company WOULD fine you for doing it, they consider it "stealing".
@@joewoodchuck3824 My apologies, you are correct, I said RF when I meant that it creates a magnetic field around the wires that can be picked up by another copper coil. Can see where my post was confusing, thank you for the correction.
in 1969..in North Thailand..I worked near the CommSEC radar domes..We could carry 4 foot florescent bulbs within 500 yards of the domes and they would light up brightly..I wonder what working there 12 hours a day did to my health?
I have a friend who, while in the Navy, had an acquaintance who claimed that he and some of his friends would take fluorescent tubes to high voltage power lines and launch the tubes up at the power lines at their lowest points between the transmission towers. This man claimed to my friend that the fluorescent tubes would light up very brightly as they came very close to the wires. The man also claimed that if the fluorescent tubes actually contacted the wires, the tubes would spin around the wires for a few seconds and then explode from the high voltage. My friend and I have serious doubts about the veracity of this person's claims, but have both wondered what would happen if you did do what this man claimed and flung fluorescent tubes at high voltage wires. Neither of us are actually willing to put this to the test.
Merely carrying around a fluorescent tube inside a darkened house when the humidity is low, such as during cold weather, will produce visible flashes of light due to small electrical discharges you don't even feel.
My former work I worked at for 20 years had high voltage lines running down the main street in front of the business and I always heard them buzzing when it was wet or icy out
I stopped under some very large ones that led to Los Angeles, and you could get about 1/2 inch of spark to jump between your fingers and the car body. It was also loud enough to hear the sound from the spark, even next to a busy road. It was strong enough that I worried about having electronics out of the car.
Was this in the afternoon during a heatwave by any chance? With the whole LA Basin running air conditioning, I would think power flows would be at near maximum levels.
Ok...for one thing, that transmission line isn't on the magnitude of a real HV line. Circuits like the one in the clip supply smaller loads to step-downs for smaller distribution areas. If you want to see the effect you're aiming for, the power line has got to be one of those spicy 765 kV ones. That's where you see those dramatic pics being taken. One other note...about that "antenna", you need to never use that, period! Consider what you're proposing doing: holding up a conductor under a transmission line that has to be up that high in a CLEARED path is potentially suicidal. You're providing a closer path to ground...and if you do this when the lines are making those sizzling noises, there's a very REAL possibility that all that will be left of you is a smoking pair of shoes and a big, greasy soot-mark. DO NOT EVER DO THIS!
I did this back in 1983 in England. Not only did it glow, the roof of my car started to 'tingly' vibrate. It's called 'electrovibration' and is caused by it not being grounded. I didn't hang around.
My father had a horse farm with electric fences running under 250K voltage lines. The fence charger would burn out if we tried to hook one up. The induced voltage from the powerlines was enough to function as a stigmatizing deterrent but you could tell that it had higher joules. The current took the better part of a minute to build back up after you touched it. What I did for an experiment was to lower the volts with a transformer, because it was alternating current after all. What I wish I had progressed to was the use of a diode rectifier like you have there. Then, one of those variable-input buck transformers that takes in 50 to 13 volts DC and puts out a consistent 12 volts DC. Then, I could have had one of those 12-volt supercapacitor banks like some RUclipsrs have used in place of a car battery. Then you have some nice standby power and can charge a battery also. What is interesting about this technical challenge is that if the Earth's magnetic field goes away for 3,000 years like it is said to be able to do, then solar and cosmic electromagnetism will do this to the entire sky. It would be an "EMP disaster," but the effect would be more sustained and consistent. Therefore, any suspended wire would become a free energy collector and flourescent tubes would become the light bulbs of choice. The electrical system would have to be re-tooled, obviously.
Perhaps that is how the grid systems worked before, and at some point "they" created the magnetic field we see today. Could some massive hidden geothermal power plants placed at key points across the earth generate our current magnetic field? IF this was done in theory, it may explain the star fort setups we see across the world, the domes and cathedrals we see across the world everywhere that could have been actually power plants harvesting energy from the air before the change in the magnetic field. I know that sounds insane, but the more u look into it, the more you wonder
Run a long insulated wire a few feet off the ground and parallel to the power lines to act as the generator antenna and connect the wire to one end of the fluorescent tube and the ground wire to the other end of the tube. I think you will have the potential to get more induction with a horizontal antenna than a vertical one. You could try this set up with your rectifier circuit and check out the DC output. I would think that the length of the antenna will affect the amount of electricity inducted into the wire and that a longer antenna has more output potential than a short one and that horizontal orientation would be better than vertical. I could be out in left field on my suggestions, it's Just a thought
You should do an experiment set those up in your yard during a thunderstorm and see which ones light up just before lightning. I wonder what kind of experiment that would pan out to? I would love to see the results.
We must remember in normal use a tube has a "Starter" unit without which it will not light properly! Not being an electrician I don't know but maybe there is a way to wire one in to your experiments and see what happens? Very interesting!!
In a Navy we used to tape for us and bulbs on broomsticks and stick them in front of our microwave illuminator you can see where the beam is lights up that area The rest is not lit
Remember going to a L RAN station and the guys would take a Florencent tube light and hold it next to a power line in some kind of pipe and it would light up so bright.
I work for a power utility and work with high voltages. Lines and substations. Those weird looking places that look like space ports. There is a reason we build fences around them and put up those danger signs. Please be cautious, these lines and installations transfer and control extreme amounts of energy. Be very cautious around facilities high voltage or any voltage if your not fully knowledgably and trained.
I’m amazed by substations. Over time I’ve figured out the switches… Just seeing how the lines attach to the insulators on the poles is amazing. I figure most are completely clueless to all the hardware required to power that TV.
Yes, the high-voltage power lines can be very dangerous. I recall an incident in December 2007 in East Palo Alto, California. A 23-year-old man was electrocuted while hanging Christmas tree lights in a 60+ feet tall redwood tree at an apartment complex. Here is the gruesome story, copied as reported by FOX News at that time: -------------------------- EAST PALO ALTO, Calif. - A man decorating a tree outside an apartment complex was electrocuted when a string of Christmas lights touched a high-voltage power line, authorities said. The 23-year-old man, who had climbed about 60 feet up a redwood tree in East Palo Alto, was trying to throw the string of lights onto hard-to-reach branches when he was killed instantly Saturday, according to Menlo Park Fire Protection District Chief Harold Schapelhouman. Shortly after a neighbor reported the incident around 12:20 p.m., fire crews arrived on the scene and found the man's body attached the tree with smoke rising from his feet, officials said. The body hung for more than an hour as hundreds of neighbors watched. Firefighters had to wait for utility crews to shut down power lines that supply electricity to thousands of nearby homes and businesses. Firefighters brought the man's body down from the tree after the power was turned off, Schapelhouman said. The victim, whose name was not being released until his family was notified, worked for Page Mill Properties, which owns apartment buildings in the area, Schapelhouman said. "Our heart goes out to this young man and his family," Schapelhouman said. "He was trying to improve things a little bit for Christmas and he made a small miscalculation and it cost him his life."
It would be cool to set a string of LEDs along the length of the power line. I'm not sure exactly what would be the best way to wire it... You might be able to visually observe the grids power consumption based on the brightness of the LEDs
It only lights because there is current flowing though the transmission wires. [someone is using power] Your lamp is actually costing the power company money because you are disrupting the normal magnetic field of the wires. Albeit a fraction of a penny.
Your experiments with the power lines are really interesting. There are tiny neon panel lights that run at high voltage and need very little power. Can you make an illuminated fence? How close together along the fence can you put the neons and still have them light?
As a kid I had florescent desk light that I'd occasionally remove tube and play with in total darkness, it would glow between my hands. (no big power lines around)
Your Antenna is USELESS for lighting these bulbs. Your "antenna" needs to be about 50 ft of wire running PARALLEL UNDER THE TRANSMISSION LINES with the parallel wire hooked to one end of the bulb and the ground wire on the other end of the bulb. This way, you get the Maximum effect of drawing the electricity from the high voltage lines. Try it again using this method and you might be surprised 👀👀.....👍👍👍 HINT - It's the static electricity from the high voltage lines that light the tubes - by running the wire in the same direction as the high wire lines, in essence, you are creating an OPEN AIR TRANSFORMER (no rectifiers needed).....PS, I took "electricity AND electronics" in high school, so I know pretty much about this stuff 🤪🤪
It might also be interesting to set up and antenna or your long fence line whatever and hook it up to an oscilloscope and an amp rope. It would be kind of cool to monitor the voltage, frequencies, amperage at different times of the day.
HOWZABOUT getting a couple of 9 volt alkaline batteries in series & in series with the filaments & a switch & then hook up your " POWER " line . . . Then turn the switch off after the tube lights . . . God Save US . . .
If I were living there, I would make a huge coil with thick wire (maybe AWG 00) and make it resonant to 60Hz. If I could, I would attach some kind of iron core for better performance, though it must be taken into account for the resonance calculation of the coil. The thing would be placed above ground (maybe in a large wooden table) and be put directly under the power lines at their lower altitude in the property. Even when it would be a pricy setup because of the wire, I would have "free" energy, or better said, "pirated" energy as long as transmission lines are energized. In this case, as if it was a transformer, the higher the load in the lines (users in the city with many appliances turned on), the higher the current induced in my coil as a secondary. Since this gives no control over voltage, I would rectify it and regulate it to charge batteries for an inverter.
Try this. Leave your ground rod in and them put another one 90 degs from it about 100 yards away. Measure the voltage between them. Its not much but it will run your driveway or sidewalk lights 24 hours a day.
Would somebody please comment on my question? How does this electromagnetic radiation impact our body's electromagnetic rhythm like heartbeats? How can we protect ourselves and what kind of equipment is there on the market that enables a "shielding" of our own houses" against powerline radiations?
On one hand you and me and each individual person alive world wide are each welcome to call on Our YAHUAH or Our YAHUSHAH for receiving a remedy for ceasing any unwanted illness including though not limited to war. On the other hand you and me and each individual person alive world wide can each free willingly accept such a welcome.
in the early 80s a family friend who lived near the power plant and its transmission lines showed us how the fluorescent tube lit up just holding it in the air near the lines.. as kids we were amazed as if we were seeing magic! it always stuck in the back of my mind as a reminder that there are things around us that affect us that we can't see.. it was a powerful and inspiring lesson
How about taking a multi meter out with you next time so that you can actually measure voltage and/or amperage between your ground and your antenna. This would give an idea about how usable or storable the field created by the H/T wires actually is in different conditions.
I remember seeing a tv reporter hold up a tube in each hand under a large set of power lines in daylight and you could see them glowing. That was in the ‘80s.
I never say it but years ago when the Coast Guard maintained the LORAN transmitters it was said that a florescent tube would light standing at the tower.
Call that electric and tell them they need to put lights along the transmission lines! Let them know you could trip on their property while stealing electricity and they'd have to pay.
if you are illuminating a fluorescent bulb at all in that situation it is wireless power. tesla did that in front of some spectators apparently way bright from 10 ft away, but he figured out other things involved in its operation and use of components in a very specific manner that is a mystery to us.
on a larger scale, the sun's high radiation energy hits earth (like the energy from the transmission lines) and lights up our magnetic forces (auroras). When they are powerful enough, the sun's energy hits long power lines and they, in turn, generate serious power surges. Fun stuff, that invisible force.
The sizzling is corona discharge. The 230 kV is enough to pull air molecules apart and they become ions. And ions can provide a conductive path and bleed a little bit of power off of the 230 kV lines. Th power company works hard to remove sharp points and edges on their insulator connections (reducing 1/r^2) to reduce corona as much as possible. The moisture in the air or frost increases the small constant loss, and produces the sounds you hear.
3 ways to grab power leakage. Capacitive, just a long plate of copper insulated from ground, inductive, a bunch of rebar or similar wrapped with copper wire, or ion capture, an array of insulated spikes. The first gives the highest voltage. The second gives the most current. The third is highly dependant on weather.
High volt lines in Brownfield Texas with maybe 15 houses underneath it. Lines like yours between Seagraves and Wellman Texas with about 10 houses under neath it.
I remember an article in National Geographic maybe from the late 70s. There was a picture of a man holding a fluorescent tube up under high power lines and it was lit up.
I’ve heard of stories of people who live real close to power lines getting all types of cancers.
Месяц назад
Back in the 1970's I worked doing maintenance and mowing the fields around the WWWE 1100 transmitter site southwest of Cleveland Ohio while I was in junior and senior high school.. To walk around outside at night when the transmitter was in low power 4.5kw I would take a 4 foot florescent tube and hold it up in the air until it lit up then you could carry it around like a huge lantern.. You could set one end on the ground and it would keep glowing but you never wanted to have the electrode make contact with your hand or to the ground because you would get a nice zinger of an RF shock or it would draw an arc and burn out the tube just before it touched a grounded surface if it was operating at the daytime power of 50kw.. I don't remember what the maximum power that transmitter could do but it was one of the biggest in the area if not the country.. It used to be a civil defense EBS site so every once in a while they would test it at above licensed power and you could hear the radio station sound coming out of the duct work of the building and the hair on your body would start to tingle and stand up.. Pretty sure that wasn't healthy but when you're a teenager you don't think about stuff like that..
...good that you brought awareness of the size of the flux that is around these transmission lines, you wouldn't want to be in a building 24/7 anywhere near these high voltage lines. Having that powerfull amount of magnetic field permeating your body all day long is something i would avoid which is why i refused getting a linemans ticket and just stayed with the electrician endorsement.
I'm wondering how much more illumination you'd get by taping it to a 20 foot piece of thin wall tubing and positioning it as close to the power line as possible.
Depending on the voltage in the lines, a safe distance is 10 to 45 feet. If you get too close it will arc. When it does...... you won't feel a thing and they might not recognize your smoldering body. Pretty dangerous stuff.
If you pick up a nice full frame camera you would have better luck filming in dim conditions like this. I have the Sony A7R3 And I've have found it has great low light performance as long as you get a large aperture lens.. somewhere around f2 or greater would probably work well for this. If you're not interested in the sony camera in my Galaxy s23 ultra does great low light video also.
Great video! Make a rectifier to a usb 12v charger with a readout of current draw. Please make disclosure of your videos of explaining the hazards of Electrocution etc.
I used to park my Astro van underneath a 500 kV line at work. On damp days, when I reached for the door handle, I could feel a voltage from the handle through my boots. The roof of the van was a sizable capacitor plate insulated from ground. I often thought about connecting a multi meter to the handle and ground to see what the voltage was, but I never did.
The sizzling is corona effect. The air acts as an insulator between the lines and the ground {earth}. With moisture added and temperature effect the insulating effect of the air is reduced close to the conductor (wire). The noise you hear is the ionizing of the air. The air molecules are being polarized and beginning to conduct electrons dissipating energy into the surrounding air. How a radio/television transmitter works.
On the police department, i would hold a 4 foot tube over the cruiser and when i keyed the radio mike the tube would light up. There were no connections to the cruiser, antenna nor anything except my bare hand. Distance was about a foot above the roof.
We used florescent light tubes to peak tune the final radio frequency output tube on a commercial AM radio station back in the 1980s. The brighter the flash, the more signal was being delivered to our antenna.
We had a floursecent tube at the top of our transmitter tower 40 meters high at the boys scouts when a jota jamboree on the air was held to warm us not to climb the tower... We where only allowed to sit in a net several meters above ground in the tower made of wooden beams... The warning was quite visible contact even with Australia from the Netherlands under the right atmosphere conditions.. professional radia ham people who for once could go all out in power since at jota time no limits seemed to be there as long as you knew what you where doing...
We did that in the 80's when us teens all had cb radios in our cars...the guys who had "boosted" radios could light them up pretty bright by the antenna on the trunk
A saw a group of radio engineers do a rough tune on a 5 tower transmitter site that phased the towers where 1 or 2 would be hot and 3 or 4 would be grounded to make the tower array directional.. They setup a whole bunch of tubes hanging from tall wooden poles about 100 feet away from the towers in a circle around them.. Then by switching which towers were hot and which were grounded you could easily see that some tubes were bright and others were dim.. A few days later we took a truck with an extendable antenna and a field strength meter and drove to somewhere around 50 places on the map taking readings day and night when they had the antennas setup different ways.. The matching coils on those AM stations that I saw attached to a whole row of amplifier cabinets were huge and made out of copper tubing that was 1/2 inch to 1 inch diameter and 4 foot across.. This was very different compared to the VHF FM transmitters that were just a couple small rack mount exciters connected to one 6 foot tall amp cabinet..
Back in the 80's we ran a permanent electric fence around a large farm I was working for. Part of that fence ran under some large power lines coming from a power plant and once that fence was insulated it was hot without being connected to a charger.
I'm guessing you mean insulated at every post going into the ground, so the current wouldn't be sent to the ground at every post.
@@chadw100 Yes, electric fences are by definition insulated at each post. In this case they were fiberglass posts 5 ft high with 6 strands of wire as opposed to more common "temporary" electric fences that are 2-3ft high with steel posts, plastic insulators and one or two wires.
3 ways to grab power leakage. Capacitive, just a long plate of copper insulated from ground, inductive, a bunch of rebar or similar wrapped with copper wire, or ion capture, an array of insulated spikes. The first gives the highest voltage. The second gives the most current. The third is highly dependant on weather.
so in the next video after this, with his coax cable fence experiment, that would be capacitive. I hope he will try one to demonstrate inductive. This is very interesting!
I want to clarify somethi g i see in a lot of the comments. Its not power that is just seeping away lost forever. When you introduce an inductive circuit next to another it creates a back emf and actually opposes the flow of current in the power line, thereby causing resistance and effectively taking power. Without the light bulb in place, the emf from the power line has no opposition and therefore doesnt see a resistance on the line.
EVERY ferrous object within range of the magnetic lines of flux creates an inductive load...EVERY ferrous object! Shed, fence, windmill, automobiles, are just a few. Not to mention if any of those objects are touching ground the object magnetized is discharging continuously to ground. I demonstrated this to my students on numerous occasions using a compass near high current load. The needle...pointed the load field. After a few moments the only ferrous part of the compass (which allows one end of the needle to point North) effectively became magnetized. The needle then pointed South, and remained this way for a few days.
Very interesting I was just about to ask the same thing.
Would diamagnetic metals exhibit any load on the system? Say silver, it conducts electricity so supposedly the field would have some interaction with it no? I want to better understand relationship between induction and magnetism/circutry
@@Benpriebe314 silver is non-ferrous along with several other metals so they offer no inductive impededence to current flow.
@@Benpriebe314 current flow is the electrons moving along the conductor, outer shell of the atom to outer shell of another atom. Copper for example has one electron in it's outer shell, a good conductor, because it can move easily. Resistance is the materials opposition to that current flow. Inductance is the opposition to current flow as a result of impact on that magnetic field generated around that conductor during current flow. AC, the magnetic field collapses and expands each time the current changes direction. That impedes the change in direction of the electrons in the conductor. When ferrous material is near enough to the magnetic field, that metal becomes magnetized itself, generating it's own lines of Flux, magnetic field. This creates an added impedence to the current flow, making it harder to collapse the magnetic field each time electrons change direction. Analogy I used in class was an automobile. I start pushing it one way, voltage after a moment the car starts moving, electrons. Since our power here is 60hertz, the current changes direction 120 times a second. When I stop pushing, I run around and push from the opposite direction. Which way is the car still moving? After a moment, the car stops and starts moving the opposite direction. Resistance and inductance affects how fast the change in electron flow occurs. The lag in the change can be referred to as power factor. Another discussion, so much for the electrical theory rambling.
And lenzes law
I'd parked my car under some very high voltage transmission lines in California right where the lines sagged. It was next to a creek running from a hot spring. I had gotten out of the water and sat on a small aluminum beach chair in the dirt next to my car. I touched my car and felt a pretty good voltage. Definitely made me pull back. It would have been interesting to measure the voltage with a meter but I didn't have one. The car was acting as part of a capacitor coupling through the air.
There was a radio station in Hampton Virginia the early 80's called WPEX that put up fluorescent tubes on the tower so that it spelled out "X 15". It looked cool at night from Rt. 64. with the bulbs lit up from the RF of the antenna.
Thirty years ago I drove a clean garbage truck picking up recyclable cardboard. I was loading cardboard into my truck from a dumpster, which was positioned under large electrical wires. I mean LARGE. As I was doing this, my upper arm touched the dumpster, and I received a mild continuous shock. I can't imagine what that might do to people who actually live in houses situated under those wires.
When I was in the Navy back in the 70’s we used to strap fluorescent tubes near high powered radio sets when tuning up. The flickering lamp was a good indication we were transmitting. Also I rembet bring on a ship within 10 miles if a very high powered VLF transmitter and all the fluorescent lamps that were off would flash on and off.
Have a LED shop light light that never dims, think that might be the reason.
My brother lived in Waianae not too far from the huge Navy ammo dump and the ULF transmitter site and he used to talk about the florescent lights flickering and some radio and TV reception problems when they were transmitting..
a CB Radio properly tuned can illuminate a Fluorescent tube pretty well, i've done it and scared a friend of mine half to death with the demo, with a Linear amp the light was full brightness end to end and plenty of light to read by, and we did something similar when i was in Vo-Tech, we had some high-tension lines that ran across the campus, our instructor had a PVC Pipe with a fitting that was the right size to clip a Flouro tube into and hold it up in the air, with the other end going to the ground with just a tent stake on the end of it, it was i want to say a 10 or 12 foot chunk of Schedule 40 PVC and that tube lit up, not super bright, but bright enough you could see in the daylight, so it is doable, and its crazy what kind of power radiates as RF from things we use day-to-day, also i mentioned the CB Radio/base station with the Fluro tube, you can do the same thing by standing near an AM Transmitting station, or a SW station, that'll light a tube pretty good from not that far away (~100yds)
I used to run a small tube on my antenna with a linear "heater" and it lit easily although it screwed up my SWR. I did hear tell of a guy who had a far bigger amp who lit a McDonalds sign accidently - his alternator was apparently NOT happy about the current draw! I also had an issue with an intercom system at a bank keying up to talk to someone while in line in my car - the teller was NOT pleased at the noise on her end 😲
Great stories from the commenters and electricians. Hope you keep up your experiments.
We did it as kids with 8 foot tubes. They really lit up on high humidity days.
I knew of a guy that used florescent lighting in all but the bedrooms of the house.
He lived very close to an AM radio station.
He used his TV antenna tower for the pickup point.
It was very strange to see glowing tubes simply taped to the ceiling.
I believe that! Thanks for the story.
Set up a circuit with a step down transformer and see if you can raise the amps to something useful.
I might suggest, as a test, is to see how many meters of "fence" cable it takes to sufficiently test your lamps brightness,instead of the aluminum antenna.(10, 20, 30 meters) Also there are two contact points on each end of the lamps. Did you use antenna and ground on the same end when you tested them? Would a capacitor keep the lamps from flickering? It sounds as if you can do several experiments if you want! It is a unique lab you have!
After I sea kayaked off Alamitos Bay in Southern California I often went shopping at the Hawthorne Costco. Right behind the store are some high tension wires. I'd just wear my rubber wet suit, and rubber water shoes. I was a little damp, but not dripping. Pushing the shopping cart around the store about once every minute I get a real zap from the cart. A bit more than static electricity, but not dangerous.
Years ago I attended an electronics trade school, I remember the instructor pointing out the RF around power lines. He said you could actually take coils of wire and situate it under a power line, and you can/will produce electricity. You could even power your house just from what is being radiated into the air from the power line.
BUT the electric company WOULD fine you for doing it, they consider it "stealing".
Power lines do not radiate RF. They radiate 20 Hz (trains), 50 (some other countries outside of North America), and 60 Hz. RF begins at 3 Khz.
@@joewoodchuck3824 My apologies, you are correct, I said RF when I meant that it creates a magnetic field around the wires that can be picked up by another copper coil.
Can see where my post was confusing, thank you for the correction.
The 230Kv is the phase to phase most likely. Phase to Ground is approx. 132Kv .
in 1969..in North Thailand..I worked near the CommSEC radar domes..We could carry 4 foot florescent bulbs within 500 yards of the domes and they would light up brightly..I wonder what working there 12 hours a day did to my health?
I have a friend who, while in the Navy, had an acquaintance who claimed that he and some of his friends would take fluorescent tubes to high voltage power lines and launch the tubes up at the power lines at their lowest points between the transmission towers. This man claimed to my friend that the fluorescent tubes would light up very brightly as they came very close to the wires. The man also claimed that if the fluorescent tubes actually contacted the wires, the tubes would spin around the wires for a few seconds and then explode from the high voltage. My friend and I have serious doubts about the veracity of this person's claims, but have both wondered what would happen if you did do what this man claimed and flung fluorescent tubes at high voltage wires. Neither of us are actually willing to put this to the test.
If these things weren't so expensive and didn't burn out so fast I would line my whole place across the power lines 😂
Merely carrying around a fluorescent tube inside a darkened house when the humidity is low, such as during cold weather, will produce visible flashes of light due to small electrical discharges you don't even feel.
My former work I worked at for 20 years had high voltage lines running down the main street in front of the business and I always heard them buzzing when it was wet or icy out
You could make light sabers! And fight with your grandkid.
On a wet misty day if you walk under those lines you can feel your skin crawl.
I stopped under some very large ones that led to Los Angeles, and you could get about 1/2 inch of spark to jump between your fingers and the car body. It was also loud enough to hear the sound from the spark, even next to a busy road.
It was strong enough that I worried about having electronics out of the car.
Interesting!
Was this in the afternoon during a heatwave by any chance? With the whole LA Basin running air conditioning, I would think power flows would be at near maximum levels.
Ok...for one thing, that transmission line isn't on the magnitude of a real HV line. Circuits like the one in the clip supply smaller loads to step-downs for smaller distribution areas.
If you want to see the effect you're aiming for, the power line has got to be one of those spicy 765 kV ones. That's where you see those dramatic pics being taken.
One other note...about that "antenna", you need to never use that, period! Consider what you're proposing doing: holding up a conductor under a transmission line that has to be up that high in a CLEARED path is potentially suicidal. You're providing a closer path to ground...and if you do this when the lines are making those sizzling noises, there's a very REAL possibility that all that will be left of you is a smoking pair of shoes and a big, greasy soot-mark. DO NOT EVER DO THIS!
I did this back in 1983 in England. Not only did it glow, the roof of my car started to 'tingly' vibrate. It's called 'electrovibration' and is caused by it not being grounded. I didn't hang around.
My father had a horse farm with electric fences running under 250K voltage lines. The fence charger would burn out if we tried to hook one up. The induced voltage from the powerlines was enough to function as a stigmatizing deterrent but you could tell that it had higher joules. The current took the better part of a minute to build back up after you touched it. What I did for an experiment was to lower the volts with a transformer, because it was alternating current after all. What I wish I had progressed to was the use of a diode rectifier like you have there. Then, one of those variable-input buck transformers that takes in 50 to 13 volts DC and puts out a consistent 12 volts DC. Then, I could have had one of those 12-volt supercapacitor banks like some RUclipsrs have used in place of a car battery. Then you have some nice standby power and can charge a battery also. What is interesting about this technical challenge is that if the Earth's magnetic field goes away for 3,000 years like it is said to be able to do, then solar and cosmic electromagnetism will do this to the entire sky. It would be an "EMP disaster," but the effect would be more sustained and consistent. Therefore, any suspended wire would become a free energy collector and flourescent tubes would become the light bulbs of choice. The electrical system would have to be re-tooled, obviously.
Perhaps that is how the grid systems worked before, and at some point "they" created the magnetic field we see today. Could some massive hidden geothermal power plants placed at key points across the earth generate our current magnetic field? IF this was done in theory, it may explain the star fort setups we see across the world, the domes and cathedrals we see across the world everywhere that could have been actually power plants harvesting energy from the air before the change in the magnetic field. I know that sounds insane, but the more u look into it, the more you wonder
@@chadw100 sounds insane because it is
Higher voltage power lines than these thread through our housing complexes and NOW I see why some of our neighbours complain about head aches!
Run a long insulated wire a few feet off the ground and
parallel to the power lines to act as the generator antenna and connect the wire to one end of the fluorescent tube and the ground wire to the other end of the tube. I think you will have the potential to get more induction with a horizontal antenna than a vertical one.
You could try this set up with your rectifier circuit and check out the DC output.
I would think that the length of the antenna will affect the amount of electricity inducted into the wire and that a longer antenna has more output potential than a short one and that horizontal orientation would be better than vertical. I could be out in left field on my suggestions, it's Just a thought
Yes i do agree
Try a 1\4 wavelength wire antenna stretched out under the transmission line. :-D
That would still be a very long wire @ 60 hertz's@@amooser5839
It's capacitive coupling, not induction. Different animals.
I remember riding my dirt bike under the transmissions lines in a dry summer and feeling the hair on the back of my neck raise up.
You should do an experiment set those up in your yard during a thunderstorm and see which ones light up just before lightning. I wonder what kind of experiment that would pan out to? I would love to see the results.
We must remember in normal use a tube has a "Starter" unit without which it will not light properly! Not being an electrician I don't know but maybe there is a way to wire one in to your experiments and see what happens? Very interesting!!
You could probably do the same thing anywhere to be honest....if not with the same set up...with a slightly higher antenna! Great video man!
Are they really flashing or is that a effect caused by the camera? Veryyyy interesting content 😊 thank you
Thanks for sharing, Merry X-mas and Happy New Year. Cheers.
Same to you rockcrusher4636!
induction,, all your trying to work with. I work for hydro one, and deal with this stuff every day
It works a lot better in the late summer on a hot humid night when you hear the loud crackling of the lines
In a Navy we used to tape for us and bulbs on broomsticks and stick them in front of our microwave illuminator you can see where the beam is lights up that area The rest is not lit
it must also be effecting PEOPLE who are conductors
the top line is not power,, it is either a ground wire, coper or aluminum or a fibre optic cable imbedded in Aluminum
Electric car owners don't like it when I talk about transmission loss fron coal-burning power stations.
Remember going to a L RAN station and the guys would take a Florencent tube light and hold it next to a power line in some kind of pipe and it would light up so bright.
I work for a power utility and work with high voltages. Lines and substations. Those weird looking places that look like space ports. There is a reason we build fences around them and put up those danger signs. Please be cautious, these lines and installations transfer and control extreme amounts of energy. Be very cautious around facilities high voltage or any voltage if your not fully knowledgably and trained.
I’m amazed by substations. Over time I’ve figured out the switches… Just seeing how the lines attach to the insulators on the poles is amazing. I figure most are completely clueless to all the hardware required to power that TV.
Yes, the high-voltage power lines can be very dangerous. I recall an incident in December 2007 in East Palo Alto, California. A 23-year-old man was electrocuted while hanging Christmas tree lights in a 60+ feet tall redwood tree at an apartment complex. Here is the gruesome story, copied as reported by FOX News at that time:
--------------------------
EAST PALO ALTO, Calif. - A man decorating a tree outside an apartment complex was electrocuted when a string of Christmas lights touched a high-voltage power line, authorities said.
The 23-year-old man, who had climbed about 60 feet up a redwood tree in East Palo Alto, was trying to throw the string of lights onto hard-to-reach branches when he was killed instantly Saturday, according to Menlo Park Fire Protection District Chief Harold Schapelhouman.
Shortly after a neighbor reported the incident around 12:20 p.m., fire crews arrived on the scene and found the man's body attached the tree with smoke rising from his feet, officials said.
The body hung for more than an hour as hundreds of neighbors watched. Firefighters had to wait for utility crews to shut down power lines that supply electricity to thousands of nearby homes and businesses.
Firefighters brought the man's body down from the tree after the power was turned off, Schapelhouman said.
The victim, whose name was not being released until his family was notified, worked for Page Mill Properties, which owns apartment buildings in the area, Schapelhouman said.
"Our heart goes out to this young man and his family," Schapelhouman said. "He was trying to improve things a little bit for Christmas and he made a small miscalculation and it cost him his life."
It would be cool to set a string of LEDs along the length of the power line. I'm not sure exactly what would be the best way to wire it... You might be able to visually observe the grids power consumption based on the brightness of the LEDs
It only lights because there is current flowing though the transmission wires. [someone is using power] Your lamp is actually costing the power company money because you are disrupting the normal magnetic field of the wires. Albeit a fraction of a penny.
Your experiments with the power lines are really interesting. There are tiny neon panel lights that run at high voltage and need very little power. Can you make an illuminated fence? How close together along the fence can you put the neons and still have them light?
As a kid I had florescent desk light that I'd occasionally remove tube and play with in total darkness, it would glow between my hands. (no big power lines around)
Got a feeling you might not want to have any kids. They will probably 3 ears instead of 2 with that much electricity going through you.
Your Antenna is USELESS for lighting these bulbs. Your "antenna" needs to be about 50 ft of wire running PARALLEL UNDER THE TRANSMISSION LINES with the parallel wire hooked to one end of the bulb and the ground wire on the other end of the bulb. This way, you get the Maximum effect of drawing the electricity from the high voltage lines. Try it again using this method and you might be surprised 👀👀.....👍👍👍
HINT - It's the static electricity from the high voltage lines that light the tubes - by running the wire in the same direction as the high wire lines, in essence, you are creating an OPEN AIR TRANSFORMER (no rectifiers needed).....PS, I took "electricity AND electronics" in high school, so I know pretty much about this stuff 🤪🤪
It might also be interesting to set up and antenna or your long fence line whatever and hook it up to an oscilloscope and an amp rope. It would be kind of cool to monitor the voltage, frequencies, amperage at different times of the day.
HOWZABOUT getting a couple of 9 volt alkaline batteries in series & in series with the filaments & a switch & then hook up your " POWER " line . . . Then turn the switch off after the tube lights . . . God Save US . . .
If I were living there, I would make a huge coil with thick wire (maybe AWG 00) and make it resonant to 60Hz. If I could, I would attach some kind of iron core for better performance, though it must be taken into account for the resonance calculation of the coil. The thing would be placed above ground (maybe in a large wooden table) and be put directly under the power lines at their lower altitude in the property.
Even when it would be a pricy setup because of the wire, I would have "free" energy, or better said, "pirated" energy as long as transmission lines are energized. In this case, as if it was a transformer, the higher the load in the lines (users in the city with many appliances turned on), the higher the current induced in my coil as a secondary. Since this gives no control over voltage, I would rectify it and regulate it to charge batteries for an inverter.
Try this. Leave your ground rod in and them put another one 90 degs from it about 100 yards away. Measure the voltage between them. Its not much but it will run your driveway or sidewalk lights 24 hours a day.
Would somebody please comment on my question?
How does this electromagnetic radiation impact our body's electromagnetic rhythm like heartbeats? How can we protect ourselves and what kind of equipment is there on the market that enables a "shielding" of our own houses" against powerline radiations?
On one hand you and me and each individual person alive world wide are each welcome to call on Our YAHUAH or Our YAHUSHAH for receiving a remedy for ceasing any unwanted illness including though not limited to war. On the other hand you and me and each individual person alive world wide can each free willingly accept such a welcome.
in the early 80s a family friend who lived near the power plant and its transmission lines showed us how the fluorescent tube lit up just holding it in the air near the lines.. as kids we were amazed as if we were seeing magic! it always stuck in the back of my mind as a reminder that there are things around us that affect us that we can't see.. it was a powerful and inspiring lesson
I just had a thought! What if you build a large transformer and put underneath! Kinda like how the ac to DC transformers work
How about taking a multi meter out with you next time so that you can actually measure voltage and/or amperage between your ground and your antenna. This would give an idea about how usable or storable the field created by the H/T wires actually is in different conditions.
I remember seeing a tv reporter hold up a tube in each hand under a large set of power lines in daylight and you could see them glowing. That was in the ‘80s.
I was just telling my wife, I saw the exact same thing...
@@wientzer so I guess we do remember the ‘80s in spite of all the bad things that we did back then huh? 😂👍
I never say it but years ago when the Coast Guard maintained the LORAN transmitters it was said that a florescent tube would light standing at the tower.
Call that electric and tell them they need to put lights along the transmission lines! Let them know you could trip on their property while stealing electricity and they'd have to pay.
Old house on Park Ave, we have transmission line out front door feeding Greeley Colorado area...
if you are illuminating a fluorescent bulb at all in that situation it is wireless power.
tesla did that in front of some spectators apparently way bright from 10 ft away, but he figured out other things involved in its operation and use of components in a very specific manner that is a mystery to us.
on a larger scale, the sun's high radiation energy hits earth (like the energy from the transmission lines) and lights up our magnetic forces (auroras). When they are powerful enough, the sun's energy hits long power lines and they, in turn, generate serious power surges. Fun stuff, that invisible force.
I know it will because i did this 24 years ago, only half bright no full on and i kust stood underneath them
PLZ BE CAREFULL :D
There should be enough transient power from these transmission lines to recharge every electric vehicle in America
Put some compisters on the bottom of that tube if the comp charges it should give it enough to power the tube.wireless powered light right?
The e/m field is highest at some horizontal distance from the outer wires: about the same distance as the power line height.
1990s police radio antennas on cop cars would light them when the mic was keyed.
A wire less transmission has a cured
The sizzling is corona discharge. The 230 kV is enough to pull air molecules apart and they become ions. And ions can provide a conductive path and bleed a little bit of power off of the 230 kV lines. Th power company works hard to remove sharp points and edges on their insulator connections (reducing 1/r^2) to reduce corona as much as possible. The moisture in the air or frost increases the small constant loss, and produces the sounds you hear.
The corona also eats metal parts nearby.
3 ways to grab power leakage. Capacitive, just a long plate of copper insulated from ground, inductive, a bunch of rebar or similar wrapped with copper wire, or ion capture, an array of insulated spikes. The first gives the highest voltage. The second gives the most current. The third is highly dependant on weather.
Connect a battery on the filaments.Heat will make the electrons faster.Also theHg will evaporate and make gas conducting better inside the tube
Hard to see where you are walking? If only you had a light.🤣
My dad used to work for the coast guard in the radio room and said you could do this at a certain part of the ship.
It would have probably worked better in summer. They don't like to work in the cold.
Does anyone know if these transmission lines will mess with metal detectors? Asking for a friend.
High volt lines in Brownfield Texas with maybe 15 houses underneath it. Lines like yours between Seagraves and Wellman Texas with about 10 houses under neath it.
What would wrapping a wire in a spaced coil pattern do?
I remember an article in National Geographic maybe from the late 70s. There was a picture of a man holding a fluorescent tube up under high power lines and it was lit up.
Nickola Tesla would be proud.
I wonder if this is why we don't live as long as folks used to.
What is this transient power doing to your body?
A 5W VHF handie should light it up.
look how much power leaks out of those wires jesus!!!
❤️ya stove, fire place.
I’ve heard of stories of people who live real close to power lines getting all types of cancers.
Back in the 1970's I worked doing maintenance and mowing the fields around the WWWE 1100 transmitter site southwest of Cleveland Ohio while I was in junior and senior high school.. To walk around outside at night when the transmitter was in low power 4.5kw I would take a 4 foot florescent tube and hold it up in the air until it lit up then you could carry it around like a huge lantern.. You could set one end on the ground and it would keep glowing but you never wanted to have the electrode make contact with your hand or to the ground because you would get a nice zinger of an RF shock or it would draw an arc and burn out the tube just before it touched a grounded surface if it was operating at the daytime power of 50kw.. I don't remember what the maximum power that transmitter could do but it was one of the biggest in the area if not the country.. It used to be a civil defense EBS site so every once in a while they would test it at above licensed power and you could hear the radio station sound coming out of the duct work of the building and the hair on your body would start to tingle and stand up.. Pretty sure that wasn't healthy but when you're a teenager you don't think about stuff like that..
Great story! Thanks for sharing.
Nikola Tesla was no Dummy! ⚡
can someone call the cops. i want to report a joule thief!
Be careful, good way to fry your A$$!
...good that you brought awareness of the size of the flux that is around these transmission lines, you wouldn't want to be in a building 24/7 anywhere near these high voltage lines. Having that powerfull amount of magnetic field permeating your body all day long is something i would avoid which is why i refused getting a linemans ticket and just stayed with the electrician endorsement.
I'm wondering how much more illumination you'd get by taping it to a 20 foot piece of thin wall tubing and positioning it as close to the power line as possible.
No ...................just, no.
Depending on the voltage in the lines, a safe distance is 10 to 45 feet.
If you get too close it will arc.
When it does...... you won't feel a thing and they might not recognize your smoldering body.
Pretty dangerous stuff.
If you pick up a nice full frame camera you would have better luck filming in dim conditions like this. I have the Sony A7R3 And I've have found it has great low light performance as long as you get a large aperture lens.. somewhere around f2 or greater would probably work well for this.
If you're not interested in the sony camera in my Galaxy s23 ultra does great low light video also.
Right now I just have the Galaxy AO2s. At some point I would like to get a good camera, with good sound, and with stabilization.
Great video!
Make a rectifier to a usb 12v charger with a readout of current draw.
Please make disclosure of your videos of explaining the hazards of Electrocution etc.
I used to park my Astro van underneath a 500 kV line at work. On damp days, when I reached for the door handle, I could feel a voltage from the handle through my boots. The roof of the van was a sizable capacitor plate insulated from ground. I often thought about connecting a multi meter to the handle and ground to see what the voltage was, but I never did.
This is some witchcraft!
The sizzling is corona effect. The air acts as an insulator between the lines and the ground {earth}. With moisture added and temperature effect the insulating effect of the air is reduced close to the conductor (wire). The noise you hear is the ionizing of the air. The air molecules are being polarized and beginning to conduct electrons dissipating energy into the surrounding air. How a radio/television transmitter works.
That is fascinating and scary as I live near high voltage lines
On the police department, i would hold a 4 foot tube over the cruiser and when i keyed the radio mike the tube would light up.
There were no connections to the cruiser, antenna nor anything except my bare hand. Distance was about a foot above the roof.