Q's about a Cyonics ArIon laser

[mixedgas]

I gave buffo a tube as a little reward for hosting selem. Its a HMG medical model 903 tube that was in a swiss made medical laser prototype. Buffo has a model 05 medical air cooled laser with a dead tube. The same psu will run both tubes, so all he needed to do is swap out the wiring etc.

So ALC = american laser corp (now defunct) makers of the famed 60X aircooled

ALC was the parent company of HGM

900 series is a type of laser tube that came in wet (water cooled) and air cooled varients.

Buffo is a former navy sub crew memeber back in the em, glowing area of the sub. He doesnt need a laser to glow blue. Hence the term Nuc.

A twidgett is navy slang for a new, or bad, electronics tech who keeps turning the knobs and doesnt leave instruments and adjustment alone.
Depending on the language used around it, it can be either a slam, curse, derogatory, or praise, as in that damn twidget blew the scram breaker, or praise, as in That twidge got our sonar signal to noise level down to below ambient, and we won the sinkex. Twidge is the more positive version.

sinkex = exercise to sink targets (surface ships)

My dad was in the air farce and the marine corps, and later worked as a defense contractor, and my high school physics teacher and mentor was a former attack sub captain , so I know some milspeak. My teacher called me twidget as a derogatory nickname with the other teaching staff.

Power on Demand, laser power supply and cooling sysem designed to be as small as possible for medical use, fitting a laser into a tower pc sized package as opposed to being on a big cart and water cooled. The tradeoff was the laser cant take running continious wave for more then about 30 seconds, or the tube melts or the power supply FETS melt (fet =field effect transistor)
POD systems are a bad investment for a laser hobbyist wanting to do shows.

So does the conversation make some sense now?

Steve

[Hemlock Mike]

I am looking for the schematics, book etc mostly for my own knowledge. Why does it take so many components to make the damn thing work ?? So many status LED's and I don't know what's going on other than it puts out a single line blue. I do now run it at about half power.

Thanks & Merry Christmas

Mike

[buffo]

Mike;

When you've got some free time, Check out Sam's Laser FAQ and in particular, read as much of the Argon chapter as you can. It's a lot of reading, I know, and you won't remember half of it the first time through. But if you read it a couple times, things start to sink in, and you'll understand a lot more about where that pretty blue beam comes from. (That's how I learned...)

For one thing, unlike a HeNe tube, an argon laser has a heated filament, just like the old vacuum tubes did. So there's a section of the power supply that supplies low voltage, high current power to heat the filament. Then you have the main discharge (the arc that flows through the tube to excite the gas). This is around 100 volts DC for your tube, at 5 to 10 amps of current. That's a lot of juice, so there's a major portion of the power supply devoted to supplying that current. Then you've got the ignitor circuit, which develops a ~10Kvolt pulse to ionise the gas in the tube and initates the current flow. On top of all this you have current regulation, a power sensing circuit (which also ties into the current regulator), several interlocks (required by the CDRH), a cooling system (with it's own thermal interlock), and a few other status indicators that together make up the power supply. So yeah, they can be a bit complex...

As for Steve's description, it's 100% on the money. I used to be in the Navy, and now my son is sort of following in my footsteps. However, I was in the Nuclear Power Program, while my son is going to be an Electronics Technician. (Mostly navigational electronics and radar...) Plus, I was a submariner, and I *think* my son plans to go to the surface fleet. But we'll see... (Damn surface Navy! Shit floats!)

Anyway, at SELEM 2007 Steve and I spent a little time swapping stories from our youthful days, and since he grew up with a military family and had teachers that were ex-military, he spoke the same language I did. We had a great time telling war stories, and every once in a while we lapse into mil-speak just for old-time's sake.

BTW Steve, that wasn't a "little" reward... It was a *HUGE* reward! I'm very grateful. (And you just wait until SELEM 2008... We're going to have even more fun!)

Adam