I can't be sure what did it to me, but if you look at my youtube channel "mayday run" it was just after that. Yes, half my shop got activated, and weeks later BillF came over and saw the hotness in my cobalt alloy drills on a pretty sensitive geiger counter (we call it henny penny as it's always telling us the sky is falling). My own gear shut down - pulse pileup to the point of just DC outputs from everything...My PC crashed, but the micros kept going.
I have a lot of lead, probably not X rays from the fusor itself - it's well enough shielded, barely a leak anywhere on it, and I'm behind quite a lot of it. (X rays do act light light in a fog in air, a simple wall isn't enough if there's a leak, FWIW). This is in fact what motivated that project to some extent, but it was really good already for normal running in the 1-20 million n/s range "stable".
But if you have enough neutrons, you have capture gammas everywhere...and those are LOUD stuff that lead simply doesn't stop at all. In fact, the 2.2 MeV or so one from capture in hydrogen happens
right at the 5 or so order of magnitude minimum for lead absorption, about where compton leaves off and pair production begins. I know I was sick as heck, and it wasn't flu- more like all my blood turned to water and all I could do was broth for awhile. I hate to say my estimated numbers, they are so high it's crazy. I did kind of replicate it for a couple seconds to make sure, and yes, this mode is possible, and involves RF, and gain between the ion grid and the main grid, like a plasma triode tuned just right - I was trying that, but it's a total accident I got anywhere near the right frequency, and bodes well for later testing - from a distance. Call it milliwatts of fusion, in the 10's for a very gross estimate after the fact from the forensics. I was going down that path becasue I'd earlier noticed that we got most fusion and Q at onsets, not in "stable mode" and was pursuing oscillation since my "plasma triode" has a power gain of about 100 - I figured why not just try a transformer (windings in series with each grid feed) and make a hartley type oscillator and see what happens? Now I know. Don't do that from close by.
This could be partly explained by the
Mathieu equations with a few more variables for space charge (the stuff of mass spectrometers) etc, spin alignments or dunno. It happened is all I'm sure of at this point, and scared crap out of me, and I'm no stranger to danger.
I'll report more when I have more, for now, I just don't want to excite all the skeptics (or the other sort - fanboys) and be a target of that junk - we normally take extreme precautions around EMI and rad exposure.... I know what I saw, and what we measured weeks after - my drill bits are still hot enough to measure easily. So was a bag of antimony I had lying around for making bullet alloys. But it's a lot of work to prove real calibrated numbers from that stuff since we don't know what moderation there was for those things, they weren't in the "neutron oven" at the time, just out in the room like me.
Richard, you're only right in your assumption of X rays vs neutrons if the X rays are from and at the power supply volts (we were already stopping those to within 10x of the background count at the operator position). At capture gamma levels...it's another story, see Sieverts and that math. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying we can't be sure at this point. More data is required, that's why we get into the lab in the first place.
Jim, you're welcome, sharing is what it's all about with me. Be prepared for some fiddly stuff, and get a 2.5 or more diopter lens to take that 1M-infinity focus down to the range you have, turn off most of the "auto" stuff on the web page served by the pi and you're good to go. Most of the "issues" I had were due to raspi-update around adding the cute little 320x240 screen to this so I could run it standalone (not actually required, actually, it works fine without the screen, a keyboard, or anything else). It seems that Hexxeh doesn't test to see if his magic firmware (raspi bios) updates break other stuff, is all. Make a backup first....there's no easy way (or at all in some cases) to roll that thing back. But hey, 2.5+ mbytes/sec of full HDMI, yeah, now we're talking. I shrunk these so as not to waste bits here. I was going for more focus accuracy and wanting to see it. Too bad the grid was oriented so that one of the rods sort of hides that, I'll be fixing that next time I break vacuum. I do that rarely as I've found that there's a big difference when you get to "really pure" in there. My system stays pumped down 24/7/365 to below e-8 mbar except when I'm going to change something, and I'm using 6 9's pure D here. A half percent of water makes it real nice and stable, but the real stuff happens at ppm levels. Thats HARD to do, but like with silicon, it seems necessary. (for those not an old fart, silicon was theorized for quite awhile to be a good semiconductor, but for years we had germanium as they just couldn't get silicon pure enough to be useful). Same thing seems to apply here, as a first guess. There are other issues better covered on my forums of course, but that is one of them. Focus is another, and what happens right at an onset of fusion appears to be another real biggie.
I'm finally getting my data aq so I don't have to ignore things that even Farnsworth himself reported, but couldn't replicate. That's one reason I am trying not to make an extreme claim here - I want to replicate this myself, and of course, have others do so as well - that's what makes science what it is. For now, let's just say I found something interesting. When I have it so it can't be refuted, I'll let you know. I know how sick I was....that's a data point I'd rather not take again.
