May I ask whay you did "back then" that you worked with these devices?

No 

There was no radiation shielding. I doubt the speeds used would have generated Beta but they had other valued radiated effects. The only problem was you turn it on and you had to fly using stored hydraulic pressure for controls.
At the time I wasn't on the technical side of the device but I do remember the techs saying once started it provided its own power for internal elements. I doubt that meant it was self-powered but that stuck in my mind then.

I would give my mother-in-law for one now 

NDA?

Nothing that breakable 

The only thing I ever saw that looked almost exactly like one... There are two of them in the middle of the big TPU. They appear to be the same size also. The idea of any experimenter getting their hands on a small betatron is ridiculous.

I think there is a good reason for limited information on these.

BTW: The charge rotational axis was as most would expect but the magnetic axis was 90 out (as I'm sure you would expect) and now that there have been many years for me to think about it the latter should have also rotated again around the charge axis.

See why I would give my mother-in-law for one?

One method that does seem to give overunity is Naudin's so called plasma cold fusion. I used a graphite rod (negative) and stainless steel sheet (positive) in potassium chloride solution in a 500 ml lab beaker. The carbon glows white hot in the water with brilliant flashing white sparks on the surface. Weighing the water before and after and the voltage and current input there seems to be overunity. Naudin gives the full calculation:-
http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/ape/index.htm
The graphite rod is also pitted even after only a two minute run.

Mike

Carbon to iron transmutation.
Continuing my last posting regarding plasma electrolysis with a graphite rod, I remembered Joe Champion and Michio Kushi's low energy transmutation experiments. They claimed that arcing carbon under water transmutes it to iron. The configuration with plasma electroysis is slightly different but nevertheless a mass of brown particles have sunk to the bottom of the beaker I used. Holding a neo magnet underneath showed strong magnetic attraction on some particles suggesting they are ferromagnetic. The stainless steel counter electrode is not attacked at all so the ferromagnetic particles must have come from the graphite rod I used. However it is spectrally pure graphite. The potassium chloride electrolyte is reagent grade and the water distilled so I conclude that Champion & Co are right carbon (graphite) has transmuted to iron.

Mike

@Mike: yeah, I've heard quite a number of accounts of
underwater discharge systems accumulating a brown
muck at the bottom (or at the electrodes) and/or
brownish 'spume' on top of the water... I seem to recall
most of those did use carbon (graphite) rod electrodes.

@Forest: well, yeah, exotic electron+proton=>neutron
fusion could explain it I guess... But that is not really
considered to be a common reaction...
I would guesstimate it is due to absorption of neutrons
from the water. Possibly even absorption of multiple
protons and neutrons. After all, if the water contains
deuterium, deuterium-hydrogen nuclear fusion may occur
(if the fields and energies are right), which as we all
know should produce a nucleus with 2 protons and 1 neutron,
which is a Helium nucleus a.k.a. alpha particle.
But I must admit it is quite a large jump to get from Carbon
to Iron: Carbon has 6 protons and 6 neutrons (98.9% of it does,
1.1% of it has 7 neutrons but is still stable, only trace amounts
just above 0% are unstable C14 with 8 neutrons and decays into
Nitrogen14 after a near 6000 year halflife) while Iron has 26
protons and 30 neutrons (91.7% of it does, while theoretically
any range between 28 and 34 neutrons will still form Iron,
of which only Fe57 and Fe58 (with 31 resp 32 neutrons) is
stable along with Fe56. All the others decay, although Fe54
with 28 neutrons has a halflife of approx. 3000 billion billion years,
if I'm not mistaken. So it's not stable but I wouldn't really call
it very instable either.

In any case, my point is: to get from 6 protons and 6 neutrons
to 26 protons and 30 neutrons, we'd clearly need to add another
20 protons and another 24 neutrons... And if we'd need to get
all those from Deuterium and Tritium, we'd need something like
16 Deuterium atoms and 8 Tritium atoms, which would give us
16 proton+neutron pairs and 8 neutron-proton-neutron triplets,
resulting in the necessary 20 p and 24 n.
That's a hell of a lot of heavy water getting cemented together
into one iron atom!
Seems highly unlikely...
Let's assume 4 carbon nuclei can join the fusion dance...
then we'd already have 24 protons and neutrons, and we'd only need
2 more protons and 6 more neutrons...

Sigh... Well, IDK.
But it sure looks like it can't just be the water providing those huge amounts
of neutrons... Or you'd have some damn heavy water running from your taps!

@Sparks

Yes, to test for this I have done the experiment with two graphites and with graphite and tungsten and I still get the stuff attracted by a magnet. If two dissimilar materials are used the graphite is always negative.

Champion does it by striking an arc (no electrolyte) with a graphite rod into graphite powder inside a graphite crucible and gets this magnetisable material. Michio Kushi says it also works with striking an arc on graphite powder in a copper dish, again no electrolyte, I have not tried these

Mike

@Sparks

Amateur research capabilities are clearly limited so the best you can do is to buy stuff already guaranteed purity. The high purity graphite rods are expensive but you do get an analysis of their trace element content, a few parts per million of iron and less of other paramagnetic elements. The water is lab grade, but anyway some of the magnetic crud pieces produced are the size of a pin head, hardly trace elements. Of course it is not possible to do absolutely conclusive experiments without a university lab.  The only comfort is that Prof. Bockriss apparently repeated this and other similar experiments at A&M university.   
The real problem is conceptual because it does not fit the current paradigm of nuclear reactions requiring huge energies, which ideas are the natural evolution of Rutherford's experiments in the Cavendish laboratory with particle accelerators using voltage multipliers and later the cyclotron etc ending with the LHC at Cern.
There may be other ways though; Champion suggests that the nucleus is arranged in alpha particle  sized blocks which can get easily rearranged with little energy and no dangerous particle emissions, so for example 10* alpha = ₂₀Ca⁴⁰and oxygen and carbon give iron 2(₆C¹² + ₈O¹⁶) = ₂₈Fe⁵⁶.
The important possibility is that some of these reaction could be usefully exothermic without the danger of emitted nuclear particles.

Mike