Doing some initial low-power tests with a cheap ‘100 watt’ linear HF amplifier for Tesla Coil experiments.
Oddly, this amp seems to work best without a tuner. Perhaps some quirk with impedance, I haven’t tracked it down yet.
Powering a Tesla Coil Extra it lights florescent bulbs nicely at a few feet away, though the SWR (reflected power) was too high for me to push it past about 10 watts.
I could see fashioning this into a full-fledged unit, powered from a variable ~7-13v power supply. I did not have much luck varying input; power spikes way too quickly with only a tiny change in applied voltage.
The rough test did also confirm again my earlier experiments using a Tesla Coil extra to light fluorescent tubes from a few feet away using only a few watts, since I could directly measure the DC power input to the unitš¤