Guru or not, can you notice the load is directly connected in parallel with the 8000V source?

I used the same idea as in a triode circuit above.
But I will gladly approve any better design!

 I'm by no means an expert here, but here are some of my thoughts on your theories of pulling a current out of the Ether instead of your actual supply:
1: It is in no way advanced knowledge that electricity will take the path of least resistance. Therefore, in your diagram in post #134, the load is going to pull whatever power it needs from the supply, and the rest will be left to burn up in the modified triode device. Unless you are somehow creating miniature fission reactions with the alpha particles, nothing is going to feed back out to the load.
2: As for post #137, and my above comment, using a standard Tesla coil as a load is just going to draw off the main supply, and even if you used a transformer that has primary windings for 8000V, all that will be accomplished is a Tesla coil. If you aim to use the toroid or dome to draw energy from the Ionosphere, you will need to aim to reach the highest possible altitude with the toroid or dome in order to pull energy off of Earth's magnetosphere and the Ionosphere. If your aim is to draw static energy from the flow of water in the aquifers and it's channels, you will need to be positioned over a major aquifer and get deep enough to tap the static field that surrounds the rushing water.

If the goal is to draw on a power source that is not fed by the circuit supply, it must be an open circuit, and maybe it would be wise to get back to what Mr Tesla was doing with Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe, and like I stated above, reach to the sky or "dig/drill for China" and get down to the aquifers, preferably to a layer of granite to maximize the static charge you can draw from.   It can probably be done on a  smaller scale using a stream, spring, or an artificial setup using living water. The more static charge, the better.

I have not done any of these things myself as of late, so don't start your attempts off of my words. Go research Mr Tesla's work for yourself and decide what is the best and most feasible method.  I may be a bit inaccurate in my above statements since I have only spent limited amount of time studying Mr Tesla's patents, notes, books, and plans thus far, but in my opinion, this is the direction in which people should be trying to go to start.  In my opinion, if one does not understand the basis of Mr Tesla's earlier work that led up to his discovery of the ether, there is a very small chance that one will actually succeed in drawing energy from it, unless they just happen to accidentally stumble upon a setup that does exactly that.

Not trying to be a buzzkill here or anything, but it would be great if we could bring this back to the topic of designing/building/testing/modifying crystal radios and experimenting with the main components in said devices without running off on wild tangents, untested theories and various other devices that have very little to do with crystal radios.  If two or more people are interested in following up on any various ideas not closely related to the crystal radio, another thread can always be started and linked to in this thread. 

I personally, along with several others I'm sure, have not yet learned very much about crystal radios and their operation and would very much like to do so.  I know to some of you this seems like child's play and you are bored with it, but many people aren't and would love to learn more.  Of course this is just a suggestion since I in no way have any control over what's said and done in this forum.

Thank you.
Kind regards,
Brian

Not trying to be a buzzkill here or anything, but it would be great if we could bring this back to the topic of designing/building/testing/modifying crystal radios and experimenting with the main components in said devices without running off on wild tangents, untested theories and various other devices that have very little to do with crystal radios.  If two or more people are interested in following up on any various ideas not closely related to the crystal radio, another thread can always be started and linked to in this thread. 

I personally, along with several others I'm sure, have not yet learned very much about crystal radios and their operation and would very much like to do so.  I know to some of you this seems like child's play and you are bored with it, but many people aren't and would love to learn more.  Of course this is just a suggestion since I in no way have any control over what's said and done in this forum.
 
Perhaps you should join a crystal radio forum in this case?
We here are trying to apply the above radio to produce some energy.







[/quote]

OK, so I have this nice loop antenna I built some years back.  It is hooked up to my stereo receiver and works great.  I wanted to use this,
or make another one like it, for my crystal radio I just made a few days back.

My question is...when I hooked it to my receiver, the radio had 2 inputs for an AM antenna.  I had 2 wire ends from the loop antenna...easy.

On my crystal radio, I have one connection for an antenna.  The loop antenna has 2 ends.

I read online that one end of the loop should go to ground.  Easily done as I have a ground connection on my crystal radio.  But, I also read that I should simply tie the two ends of the wires coming from the loop ant. and hook up to my single antenna connection on my crystal radio.

Which way is correct?

I am leaning toward the grounding idea, although, if one uses a long antenna strung between trees, one end is open and the other attached to the radio and no ground.

Very confusing.

Bill

OK, so I have this nice loop antenna I built some years back.  It is hooked up to my stereo receiver and works great.  I wanted to use this,
or make another one like it, for my crystal radio I just made a few days back.

My question is...when I hooked it to my receiver, the radio had 2 inputs for an AM antenna.  I had 2 wire ends from the loop antenna...easy.

On my crystal radio, I have one connection for an antenna.  The loop antenna has 2 ends.

I read online that one end of the loop should go to ground.  Easily done as I have a ground connection on my crystal radio.  But, I also read that I should simply tie the two ends of the wires coming from the loop ant. and hook up to my single antenna connection on my crystal radio.

Which way is correct?

I am leaning toward the grounding idea, although, if one uses a long antenna strung between trees, one end is open and the other attached to the radio and no ground.

Very confusing.

Bill

Im kind of wondering the same thing.. I have a length of 3-pair telephone wire pulled across the ridgeline of my roof and into the room,and I did not connect the wire ends on the far end at all.  On the basic variometer setup, my end of the telephone wire goes directly to the single connection for an antenna. However, if I want to add an antenna matching capacitor, am I to split up the wires to 3 and 3, run one to each side of the cap, and one of those also to the antenna in on the variometer? If I do this, do I need to go up on the roof and connect all the wire ends together so it acts as a loop, making the two connections I have inside act as the ends of a loop? Or does this not really matter?   (I guess I am about to find out!!)    I will let you know what happens with these experiments, but I'm going to have to wait until morning to go on the roof and make connections at the other end.

I am considering making a spider web style antenna out of some of the 40' of solid silver wire that I have, and then coating it with fiberglass resin or epoxy. Kind of want to design something incorporating golden ratio/angles.   

HMMM....

I am getting WAYYYYYYYY better signal, tuning range, and volume using a galena crystal and copper phosphorus catwhisker than I am with either 1n34A and 1n60 diodes.  I can hardly hear it with the 160W amplifier on max when I use the diodes, and with the galena I have it quite loud with the volume midway up.

here's something else that's weird.... I had to put several layers of heat shrink tubing over the detector pieces that I need to touch to adjust, because if I touch it with bare hands, with rubber gloves on, with a rag, etc it makes the amp POP and shut off.  fortunately it has a safety feature so that I don't blow it or the speakers up...

but it's 3AM now, and as much as I want to keep messing with this, I need to go to sleep or I won't do anything tomorrow! haha.  Well, let me know what you guys think of all this. I can make a vid if need be. 
Oh, and for my antenna coupling, I ended up having to put the cap between the antenna and the aerial input to the radio. doesn't really make any difference otherwise.

....
here's something else that's weird.... I had to put several layers of heat shrink tubing over the detector pieces that I need to touch to adjust, because if I touch it with bare hands, with rubber gloves on, with a rag, etc it makes the amp POP and shut off.  fortunately it has a safety feature so that I don't blow it or the speakers up...
...

Hi Brian,

If you switch your scope input to a sensitive amplitude range, and you touch its direct hot input (no probe) with a small piece of bare wire you hold in your fingers, what can you see displayed? Of course this depends on the time base selection too, I mean the 1 or 5 millisecond per DIV, and I assume you will see a sine wave on the normal mains frequency 50 or 60 Hz you have. The amplitude of this signal will change as you touch anything nearby like the metal body of the scope with your other hand. If this is so, then this signal (your body picks up from the EM field of the house mains wireing) makes your audio amp pop and shut off, I think. It is also possible that your hand or body picks up some other unwanted local signals from your enviroment which is already able to drive the audio amplifier.

IF you happen to have some Germanium transistors in your junk box (or in very old, at least 40-50 year old) discarded AM pocket radios, then you could test the base emitter diode of them as a diode, how they perform.
Also, you could test paralleling 2 or more 1N34A diodes (anodes to a common anode and cathodes to a common cathode) and hear how they perform.  You may try this parallel operation with the galena crystal and whisker too if you have more.
Maybe your variometer has too small inductance for the frequency your local AM station operates on.  At least each coil ought to have inductances above 100 uH at least or higher.

I found this link a very good experimental help on crystal radios, it is worth reading: http://www.bentongue.com/xtalset/xtalset.html    you can read on diode types and on the effect of giving some DC biasing to them and on several other topic important for reception.   

Addition:  this file includes good experimental findings on crystal receivers, their diodes tests etc: http://www.qrparci.org/wa0itp/chap4.pdf

Gyula