EMI stunts

[Scott]

A pwerline runs thru my uncle's farm,and according to him, it's a 138KV line..in junior high, I found out just standing under the lines with a fluorescent tube will cause the tube to light up dimly,with "waves" of light travelling up the tube from where you grip the tube.Weather greatly affected the effect, a cold night with a light snow being best.  Also, the was a 180+ volt potential between his barn roof and ground.( the power company grounded the roof for him). Anyone else out there ever try something similar? I'd considered winding a coil and connecting it to a AC voltmeter to map out the magnetic field, bit I've heard such a coil could land you in trouble as a "illegal tap"(you are,in effect, making a secondary coil of a transformer.)Just curious.

Your "coil under the power line" idea is an old one.  It is NOT illegal as you are not tampering with metering equipment nor making unauthorized connections to the power lines.  The chances of obtaining a usuable amount of power is pretty slim as there isn't much of a magnetic coupling between the 'primary' (the power line) and 'secondary' (your coil.)  You might try it with a load like a neon lamp and see what happens.

There's an explination for why the fluorescent lamp works better some times than others.  The lamp in NOT being lit by 60 Hz. leakage current as you may think.  If this were the case, the lamp would light in any weather conditons.  Also, you'd be able to determine (relatively speaking) the amount of current being carried in the line via a difference in lamp brightness.  What's lighting the fluorescent lamp is RF, generated by minute sparks.  These most often occur on dirty insulators.  Throw in a little copper oxide (from fittings and fasteners) to act as a rectifier and you have a pretty effective radio transmitter.  Lighting flourescent lamps in this manner pretty well imitates Nikola Tesla's experiments in "broadcasting" electric power back in the 1890's.