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Greetings,
I am new to this forum, so pardon if this is a stupid
Question.
Does anyone here have a working Don Smith device?
I am in the slow process of creating one and was just
Wondering if anyone had any tips.
I'm not looking for any detailed plans. Just some pointers.
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Don faked it till he made it.
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The fact that inductor wire length is a factor in the design of the inductors in Don Smith designs tells me that he is using
i) Standing waves, and/or
ii) RF radiation (transmission), propagation
Standing waves are interesting and may be a way to get around Lenz's law.
An ac signal takes time to travel down a wire, this is known as the forward wave. If the end of the wire is not terminated properly i.e. the energy is not fully dissipated, the signal comes back and travels back to the source. This is known as the reverse wave. The actual voltage or current at any point on the line is the sum of the forward and reverse waves and is known as a standing wave.
The forward and reverse waves travel down the line and back but the standing wave is stationary i.e. its envelope is fixed. There are points of maximum current and points of no current (called nodes). Also there are points of maximum voltage (amplitude, that is. Its still an ac signal) as well as nodes of zero voltage.
A quarter wavelength line transforms impedance by inverting it., i.e. it turns a short circuit into an open circuit.
At one end there is maximum voltage and zero current; at the other end there is maximum current and zero voltage.
I believe that maybe this is a key concept of Don's designs and a way to get around Lenz's law because at one end there is little to no net current so obviously no back emf flux, which when used in a transformer means less input power for the same output.
Another aspect is that of transmission (RF radiation). If the energy from the source inductor is transmitted i.e. propagated then it can be received by another coil placed in close proximity. If the coil is not directly coupled to the source coil i.e. it is just far enough away from the source inductor that it doesn't interact magnetically in a direct way, then any energy taken out of the receiving coil will not have any effect on the primary coil. It will be receiving energy that has been propagated i.e. that has left the source and is now self-propelling. Like a radio receiver but in this case very very close to the transmitter.
There seems to be a lot going on in his designs. As you go up in frequency more effects come into play. For example capacitive coupling becomes not negligible at high frequency and high voltage. There will be capacitive coupling between the two coils, which produces a displacement current. This is not a real current but does produce a magnetic field that can be tapped for energy.
Don talks about electrons 'flipping' from voltage into current. More understanding needs to be gained in exactly what 'electrons' are - especially in relation to voltage and current. Many great physicists didn't believe in the existence of electrons (Tesla, Faraday, Steinmetz)
Electrons , if they exist, are free energy devices themselves.
The other thing Don mentions is magnetic resonance. This could be related to magnetic standing waves.
This is one area that needs investigating.
Spark gaps are usually a feature of his designs. A lot has been said about plasma and this seems to be a growing area of research and the general consensus seems to be that this is a method of accessing extra energy. Sometimes I think they are to limit voltage for safety pupopses or for regulation, but not in all cases.
Electrical resonance is usually a feature which involves a higher amount of energy oscillating between inductor and capacitor than is input to the tuned circuit. The amplified energy oscillation gives an amplified magnetic field when the inductor has max current, and gives an amplified electric field (max disaplcement current) when the volts are maximum across the capacitor.
Something else important he said was that at resonance the resistance in a tuned circuit disappears completely at RF frequencies necause the electrons travel just above the surface of the conductor. This gives potentially inifinite Q factor or at least a very high Q factor. Q factor is the multiplication factor of current or voltage.
Another technique which he may be using is frequency multiplication which is common in RF designs (see class C amplifiers).
A primary coil is pulsed at frequency f and the output is tuned to 2f or 3f for example.
The deisgns normally use an earth connection and he says it pulls electrons from earth and 'traps' them. My understanding of this is very vague but I see it as something along the lines of an asymmetrical displacement current.
I think Don has spent a lot of time honing his designs so that they are very powerful, compact and efficient, and that there are multiple mechanisms generating overunity. It would be nice to 'pull apart' his designs and split them up into consituent parts that are much easier to understand rather than trying to understand everything at once.
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Q factor is the most important thing.
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Q factor will be high at RF because the 'electrons' (if you believe in them) are travelling above the surface of the wire so zero resistance.
But it will be limited by other loss factors which effectively are like having a resistance which wastes energy.
One such factor is delectric loss in the capacitor, which is like an ac resistance that is dissipative.
Another major factor at RF is that some of the energy starts to leave the inductor and propagate away as a radio wave.
There is a term for this and it is called 'radiation resistance' - effectively a resistive loss due to the transmission of energy.
So these things will affect Q factor also.
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01-04-2026, 07:26 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-04-2026, 07:50 AM by dgreen264.)
I'm seeing Don Smith devices in a very simple way now.
Magnetic resonance.
You have a parallel LC circuit with a good Q factor, so that the coil current- and magnetic field- is amplified by the Q.
At RF the amplified magnetic energy is transmitted from the coil and propagates as a radio wave. This is where the gain is, in the Q factor giving an amplified magnetic field at resonance.
You collect the propagated wave energy with a close-by pickup (receiver) coil. As long as you've got no direct (near field) magnetic interaction between transmitter and receiver that would cause a destructive back emf flux, then you are - er, in business.
