What changed because of them
His first SSTC, in 2012, came with help from Rob Bryon and Steve Ward, and he says so on the page. Four SSTC platforms followed, each sold as a board: a musical coil, a how-to guide coil written as a weekend project, a ramped SSTC that runs off the unfiltered mains and makes QCW-shaped sparks, and a single-PCB full bridge.
He took the numbered Universal Driver forward as UD2.7 and sold it as a kit, through three revisions in five months, with a pre-charge board and a brick gate driver alongside. The QCW 1 ran on the Rev A schematic. The through-hole crowd later rebuilt the 2.7C as UD2.9.
In 2013 he started what he calls perhaps the first comprehensively documented QCW build on the internet. QCW 1 threw 100 cm off a 14 cm secondary. QCW 1.5 threw 178 cm off nearly the same winding, by technique rather than size. The tinyQCW made the ramp by shifting one half bridge against the other, with no buck at all, and its page is still the clearest explanation of the trick. Two of the builds on the records wall are his.
On the DRSSTC side, Model 81 for the Singapore Science Centre was billed as the most powerful musical DRSSTC in South-East Asia in 2015: a CM300 full bridge on a hand-laminated busbar, 1500 A peak, on a custom driver of his own.
Project photos are switched off until Gao answers the request to show them.
Builds and boards on the tree
- SSTC 1 · 2012
- SSTC 2, the how-to · 2013
- Ramped SSTC 3 · 2014
- SSTC 4 · 2015
- UD2.7C · 2014 to 2015
- DRSSTC 3 · 2014
- Model 81 · 2015
- QCW 1 · 2013 to 2014
- QCW 1.5 · 2015
- QCW 2, tinyQCW · 2015
Sources
Written from what Gao Guangyan published, by one person, so it can be wrong in places. The page is meant to become editable, wiki-style, by profiles above a trust level. Until then, corrections go to the forum, and anything Gao Guangyan asks to change or remove is changed the same day.