Study of a Fluorescent Tube as Plasma Antenna

The present paper is a work on fluorescent tube performing the function of a monopole plasma antenna. In the construction, the needed power supply to the fluorescent tube is controlled by an IC 555 timer. In the experiments the supply frequency varies from 25Hz to 200Hz. By using a vector network analyzer it is shown that the persistence of plasma developed inside the tube persists for longer duration with increase in supply frequency. It is also found that the stability of resonant frequency increases with the increase in frequency of the AC power supply measured up to 200 Hz. Result shows that the effective part of a fluorescent tube functioning as Monopole plasma antenna is about 60% of the total length of the tube.