Tom, Thanks for the comment, and I need to clarify mine. You correctly state that an intact metallic enclosure will shield the interior from RF of any wavelength. And the degree of attenuation is a factor of the shielding conductivity and/or the number of layers. As you state, such complete enclosures are "Faraday cages" even when perforated with openings much smaller than the wavelength of concern, like the screen in the door of a microwave oven. My comment about the utility of shielding against long wavelengths was directed toward attempts with materials like aluminum foil that do not provide a complete conductive path around the object. A foil patch will shield the chicken drumsticks in the microwave because they are (duh) microwaves. Long wavelengths require a complete shield with no breaks in the conductivity at the joints. When I was building the cyclotron, we had a linear amp to provide 12 kw of 10.033 mhz RF (sine wave) to drive the accelerating electrodes. Because of the resulting high RF voltages, most of this ended up as RF everywhere or heating of the high-Q elements (only 300 watts ended up in the particle beam), so all our experimental enclosures had linear phosphor-bronze contact fingers around all the door seals, and we even needed nested enclosures for some detectors. (for the hams on the list, I used a 4CX1000 tube in the amplifier, operating off 7.5 kilovolts at 2 amps (a "Texas kilowatt" ?!)). But the first line of defense against RF interference in seismic amplifiers is in good amplifier and power supply design. Regards, Sean-Thomas __________________________________________________________ Public Seismic Network Mailing List (PSN-L)
Larry Cochrane <cochrane@..............>