Telsa tuner – an aid to determining the resonant point.
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A handy little circuit dubbed the “Tesla tuner” developed by Terry Fritz is used to tune Tesla coils, both for primary resonance in parallel and secondary resonance in series. It is a little 555 oscillator that at resonance will make LEDs light up brightly. The circuit is here.
The upper photo shows the internals of my version of the Tesla tuner using on hand parts. I used a 10 turn pot and various “near enough” parts to sweep between 6 – 400 kHz. The centre photo shows it on with the blue LED being the power and the red LEDs being the ones in series with the output which will be brightest at resonance. The right photo shows it in action with a frequency meter indicating 256 kHz resonance of this small coil with large toroid. The tuner (and frequency meter) goes between the ground end of the TC and ground. In this case the LED’s will be darkest at resonance. For my large TC the resonance was 41 kHz.
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Photo Date: June 1, 2007