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Originally Posted by Mike(Mont)
A capacitor is ion seperation. The way a tuned loop works is the energy is captured by the coil and a charge builds up on one side of the capacitor. Then since the other side of the cap has an imbalance the charge flows back through the coil to the other side of the capacitor and if it's tuned it will continue to resonate as the capacitor acts like a spring. I would think it shouldn't really matter which polarity of ions you are measuring because both are present.
The whole point of this discussion is that the human body can act like a tuned antenna. The body has some capacitance, and if you hold your arms out there is going to be a slight amount of energy that flows through the air from one hand to the other. So if you think of your hands as the vanes on a capacitor, the ions are right there. Comprende?
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Sure, it's easy enough to understand what you're saying, but this does not explain anything about measuring free airborne ions that are sucked from the air into a meter that is said to count them.
Generally, ions are known to result from very high voltages present in a gas, or from a source of nuclear radiation, and from chemical reactions -- but not from a loop antenna. While a capacitor can contain a charge imbalance between the plates, this imbalance is contained within the conductors, and does not cause the surrounding gas or dust particles in the air to become charged unless there is a very high voltage on the capacitor plates while they are in contact with the air.
...Which brings us back to the questions that came to mind when you described measuring an ion count peak as you adjusted your capacitor:
Has the ion content of the air actually changed due to the coil being tuned to a resonant frequency?
Maybe an RF carrier wave at the tuned frequency has something to do with it?
Did the ungrounded meter respond differently than if it was grounded?
Could the internal meter circuit be effected by nearby receiver circuits, even if the ion content of the air does not change?
And one new question:
Does this particular meter actually count ions -- or is this only what the literature says?
Best wishes,
J_P