Donald Smith Devices too good to be true

[boguslaw]

"The magnetic side which passes through almost every thing without significant loss will replicate as many times as You wish, which in turn is easily changed-flipped into useful electrical energy. The electrons present in the flipping area provide energy not previously present. This is seen as free energy. It’s the same energy provided by the normal conventional devices. The difference is a more intelligent way of getting it."
Again, one more person saying the same and still establishment is blind to see it - magnetic field is the source of energy - it is a steady flow of energy from and to the other separate dimension. It can be disturbed in clever way and we don't need all this coal, oil and gas to "make" electricity.

[med.3012]

"The magnetic side which passes through almost every thing without significant loss will replicate as many times as You wish, which in turn is easily changed-flipped into useful electrical energy. The electrons present in the flipping area provide energy not previously present. This is seen as free energy. It’s the same energy provided by the normal conventional devices. The difference is a more intelligent way of getting it."
Again, one more person saying the same and still establishment is blind to see it - magnetic field is the source of energy - it is a steady flow of energy from and to the other separate dimension. It can be disturbed in clever way and we don't need all this coal, oil and gas to "make" electricity.

Yes ! this is the point very nice quote !

[tswift]

Please permit me, if you will, to save everyone else a great of time and effort experimenting with the various things that are known not to work. In here we talk about reproducing the "Don Smith Device", as if it were just one single device. Clearly it isn't, even just in the "Resonance Energy Methods" booklet I count at least 12 totally different designs, and there are more if you watch all the videos. What is it that they all have in common? What characteristics are different? For starters I would suggest that you can completely strike out such things as matched CW/CCW coils and the 1:4 ratio of wire by length, or by weight, as being of any value. As I have suggested before, it is highly instructive for any experimenter on the Don Smith front to take time out and design and build a conventional Tesla coil first. This will help you develop many skills. Hmm, didn't Don show a picture of one of his designs that just essentially bolted on to a TOTALLY CONVENTIONAL TESLA COIL? Have you stopped to consider why that is?

Also, over the years no small number of experimenters have fooled with Don Smith-like configurations and very, very few have claimed any measure of success. If the real secret was any of the more obvious things then certainly more people would have stumbled across it by now. If it was as simple as using wire in 1:4 ratio either by length or by weight, then certainly conventional Tesla hobbyists not even looking for overunity would have discovered that certain combinations produce unusual results.

No, after no small amount of research and experimentation, I have concluded that the secret lies in the combination of the ground, the capacitance, and the voltage environment. It is some combination of these that produces the effects we are looking for. When correct, the storage capacitor in the Don Smith machine (ANY of them) gets charged with this magic radiant/cold electricity, which then produces overunity gain by reducing Lenz's law when put through a transformer. You will see these elements as conserved in every one of Don's configurations (excepting those that presumably work a completely different principle, such at the magnetic shielding idea).

Also, I once at the workbench very clearly saw the radiant effect show up. I had been zapping a nearly dead 12V gel-cell with about 10,000V from my oil burner transformer. At the feeble currents the transformer delivers this didn't charge it appreciably, and yet when I used it to power my PVM12 high-frequency supply immediately afterward, for about a minute the looped configuration I had set up zoomed up in voltage instead of running down. Then the effect dissipated and it returned to acting normally. Essentially, imagine doing something very like a Bedini-style pulse charger does, only instead of getting a sharp positive pulse from the magnetic flyback effect of a coil, essentially zapping the positive terminal of the battery with an NST, dioded, into a spark gap. The negative is connected to ground, just as in the Bedini configurations. The real question is, WHY DID THIS PRODUCE UNCONVENTIONAL RESULTS? If I really knew the full answer to that question then I would have a working device by now, but I don't. I have a lot of ideas, but the ideas only last until I can actually prove them at the workbench.

One last parting shot: why did Kapanadze bury an old radiator in the ground before connecting the device in that first garden video? Why not just attach to the building wiring as Don did? This is a rhetorical question, because I already know the answer, as should you if you have actually built and operated a Tesla coil of any significant size and power.

[boguslaw]

If you the answer then tell us. I agree about radiant energy and capacitors, grounding is probably for safety reason imho.

[med.3012]

Please permit me, if you will, to save everyone else a great of time and effort experimenting with the various things that are known not to work. In here we talk about reproducing the "Don Smith Device", as if it were just one single device. Clearly it isn't, even just in the "Resonance Energy Methods" booklet I count at least 12 totally different designs, and there are more if you watch all the videos. What is it that they all have in common? What characteristics are different? For starters I would suggest that you can completely strike out such things as matched CW/CCW coils and the 1:4 ratio of wire by length, or by weight, as being of any value. As I have suggested before, it is highly instructive for any experimenter on the Don Smith front to take time out and design and build a conventional Tesla coil first. This will help you develop many skills. Hmm, didn't Don show a picture of one of his designs that just essentially bolted on to a TOTALLY CONVENTIONAL TESLA COIL? Have you stopped to consider why that is?

Also, over the years no small number of experimenters have fooled with Don Smith-like configurations and very, very few have claimed any measure of success. If the real secret was any of the more obvious things then certainly more people would have stumbled across it by now. If it was as simple as using wire in 1:4 ratio either by length or by weight, then certainly conventional Tesla hobbyists not even looking for overunity would have discovered that certain combinations produce unusual results.

No, after no small amount of research and experimentation, I have concluded that the secret lies in the combination of the ground, the capacitance, and the voltage environment. It is some combination of these that produces the effects we are looking for. When correct, the storage capacitor in the Don Smith machine (ANY of them) gets charged with this magic radiant/cold electricity, which then produces overunity gain by reducing Lenz's law when put through a transformer. You will see these elements as conserved in every one of Don's configurations (excepting those that presumably work a completely different principle, such at the magnetic shielding idea).

Also, I once at the workbench very clearly saw the radiant effect show up. I had been zapping a nearly dead 12V gel-cell with about 10,000V from my oil burner transformer. At the feeble currents the transformer delivers this didn't charge it appreciably, and yet when I used it to power my PVM12 high-frequency supply immediately afterward, for about a minute the looped configuration I had set up zoomed up in voltage instead of running down. Then the effect dissipated and it returned to acting normally. Essentially, imagine doing something very like a Bedini-style pulse charger does, only instead of getting a sharp positive pulse from the magnetic flyback effect of a coil, essentially zapping the positive terminal of the battery with an NST, dioded, into a spark gap. The negative is connected to ground, just as in the Bedini configurations. The real question is, WHY DID THIS PRODUCE UNCONVENTIONAL RESULTS? If I really knew the full answer to that question then I would have a working device by now, but I don't. I have a lot of ideas, but the ideas only last until I can actually prove them at the workbench.

One last parting shot: why did Kapanadze bury an old radiator in the ground before connecting the device in that first garden video? Why not just attach to the building wiring as Don did? This is a rhetorical question, because I already know the answer, as should you if you have actually built and operated a Tesla coil of any significant size and power.

as you said it's a combination, let everyone work for the part he know better after that we could gather all the ideas we have for a successful device !

[tswift]

If you the answer then tell us. I agree about radiant energy and capacitors, grounding is probably for safety reason imho.

No, the ground is an absolutely essential part of the physics and nothing will work without it. The effect is due to the large (about 1F) capacitance of the Earth. The reason you need a much better ground than merely a single house ground rod (common in all up-to-code modern construction) is GROUND IMPEDANCE. At DC, you can settle for a low RESISTANCE ground. At AC, especially at RF frequencies, the total impedance of the ground connection to current is dominated by the inductive reactance, not the resistance. For a Tesla coil, operating typically at a couple hundred kilohertz, even a small amount of inductance in the connection is enough to cause significant voltage drops on the ground line, because a large amount of current passes through it during normal operation, not just during fault transients. If you try to run a Tesla coil by connecting it to your house wiring you will find this out the hard way, as the ground-loop current induced voltage could be significant and is quite capable of damaging electronics or worse.

Ham radio operators also have this problem. It is quite difficult at higher frequencies to achieve a low impedance ground, and any antennas which depend on ground currents (like a 1/4 wave vertical, for instance) depend for good performance on a low impedance ground.

If you are using a Tesla coil-like arrangement to try and tap radiant energy (like Kapanadze's primitive coil-on-a-paper-towel-holder), success depends on getting a ground that is low impedance enough that the electrons you're getting into the storage capacitor are still radiant in character. If you have a voltage drop in your ground rod and wire, this is working against you.

I'll attempt to explain further. For some reason (still unknown) it seems like the electrons care about where they are in a voltage gradient. If you have a high positive voltage overhead (like the ionosphere), then electrons that come up from the ground have a radiant character, at least for the first small fraction of the (large) voltage difference between the ground and ionosphere. For a radiant energy device, we are simulating this artificially. For instance, let's assume the top of your Tesla coil is running at 100 KV peak to peak. On the positive-going half-cycle, a grounded capacitor near the coil, within the electric field, will attract some electrons up from the ground. As long as the voltage at the ground end of the capacitor is VERY CLOSE to true ground potential, these electrons will still have that cold/radiant character at the point where they get stored in the capacitor. I don't yet know what the fraction is, perhaps it's 0.01% to 0.1% or so? So if it's 0.01%, then you can't have any more voltage rise on your ground line than 10 volts or you will only get conventional electricity in your capacitor, not cold electricity.

This suggests several strategies for maximizing the potential for success: first would be lowering the ground impedance through doing something like burying an old truck radiator! Also, lowering the frequency might help because the inductive reactance will be proportionally lower. This may explain Don's love of the 35 KHz (or so) 12V automotive NST's instead of Tesla coils, which typically operate several times higher than that. A third strategy would be to simply up the voltage of the high voltage source, so that in spite of ground impedance the electrons you're getting are still what you want.

Think of the voltage gradient between your high voltage source (which is "disturbing ambient" in Don-speak) and ground as a layer cake. You only want just the thinnest possible layer of icing at the ground end. You don't want to cut too deeply into the cake or else you'll still electrons but they will no longer work the desired magic. I think this goes a long way toward explaining why a very few researchers have had apparent success replicating Don-like systems over the years but then everyone else didn't. Those people must have had a particularly good ground, either already at their house or installed for experimentation, and as a result got cold electricity right away. I suspect that many or even most experimenters who at least got as far as ringing coils and getting appreciable resonant power transfer onto the secondary could go back and have success if they spent some serious effort in improving their grounding. Multiple ground rods or even ground plates, adding water, backfilling with salt mixtures or conductive concrete, grounding straps instead of wires, are all strategies that might be employed.

[med.3012]

Don Smith resonance device is an energy harvesting system, it's based on neutrino power that exist almost everywhere , Tesla referred to neutrinos as cosmic radiations even the name neutrino wasn't introduced at that time ..

the neutrino particle has no charge no mass this give it the opportunity to move quicker than light, in other hands this particle exist a long time ago from the beginning of life, the biggest source of neutrino is the centers of galaxies which is the black holes , as we know the black holes are the engines keep lives across the huge galactic distance so the neutrino is a vital particle ,

the earth receive this huge energetic streams and keep a portion of it in the core , now we know the earth is growing due to this invisible particle .. the effect on our body is also amazing because the DNA of child twine itself according the available power so the human body keep shrinking as we know the old human body was giant !! this is also the perfect situation because the gravity was weak ..

some of the above information from Pro Meyl description about neutrino but what i am trying is to make a bridge between his work and Don Smith system .. it's clear Don has a very strong back ground in this field to see this let me explain more :



Pro Meyl said it's not possible to take the power from the vacuum or the ZPE field so the only possibility is power from particles but in his experimental kits there's over unity !!! he said it's from other human sources probably military radiation, the radiation that came from the universe has such a high speed so it's no possible to harvest .. for a device to be an energy producer he must make particles , the particles production must be in one point .. the electron is a ball so we need a device has a major interaction in just one point ..

now let's see the solution of Don Smith, in the collection of posts in YAHOO group there's a question and an answer from Don :

this is the link : https://energyevo.com/2015/01/18/upd...y-yahoo-group/

Q: Mr Smith one question I am asking to myself, is about the concept of Bloch wall you are talking about in your book, In 1/2 wave Tesla coil there the 2 side of L2 are open, it seem to be half wave because the 2 side are open..So in you design when the L2 is center tap does it make the same effect?

A: The center tap You refer to is not fully understood. It is probably the broken dipole referred to by Bearden, which allows the background energy to enter the system. The center tap and Bloch wall are closely related in function. Coils, antennas, capacitors and such are energy pumps reacting to external forces, therefore nonlinear and have the potential to collect energy from the ambient background, when activated by external action. An earth and or air grounding is required to complete the energy system. These are essential to magnetic resonance energy systems.




the solution of Don is genius because he fixed the Bloch wall area in a coil operating in AC , this allow his unique coil to be able to collect energy from the ambient , this also solve the problem encountered by Pro Meyl because we don't need to receive the cosmic energy in the pure form ..we only need to shake it.. primarily the particles exist in the earth since it's a huge reservoir.. shaking the neutrino will produce positron ( voltage ) and electron ( amperage ), in this point Meyl agree with Don because Meyl explain the neutrino as a particle with both an electron and positron inside when excited give both in real active state ..
Don also suggest the presence of electrons as pair in inactive state !

whatever the exact description IMO we are forced to think deep in this special point ..

[Dwane]

Think of the voltage gradient between your high voltage source (which is "disturbing ambient" in Don-speak) and ground as a layer cake. You only want just the thinnest possible layer of icing at the ground end. You don't want to cut too deeply into the cake or else you'll still electrons but they will no longer work the desired magic. I think this goes a long way toward explaining why a very few researchers have had apparent success replicating Don-like systems over the years but then everyone else didn't. Those people must have had a particularly good ground, either already at their house or installed for experimentation, and as a result got cold electricity right away. I suspect that many or even most experimenters who at least got as far as ringing coils and getting appreciable resonant power transfer onto the secondary could go back and have success if they spent some serious effort in improving their grounding. Multiple ground rods or even ground plates, adding water, backfilling with salt mixtures or conductive concrete, grounding straps instead of wires, are all strategies that might be employed.

My apologies for not replying sooner to the thread. Interesting observation about the earth connection. I do recall the electrician driving a copper rod approximately 1200mm into the ground. Also, where I live is where the soil was "turned" over about 150 years ago by the gold miners of the day. It is very alkaline and almost pure shale where the site was back-filled. Possibly a contributing factor for my lack lustre response with my "Don".

I am also currently winding some new coils using a heavier gauge wire. Will post a photo when complete. Also, I have built a rudimentary spark gap given that I have been churning through the GDT's. Too much current I suspect.

Excellent thread for the persistent type of builder!

Regards

Dwane

[tswift]

My apologies for not replying sooner to the thread. Interesting observation about the earth connection. I do recall the electrician driving a copper rod approximately 1200mm into the ground. Also, where I live is where the soil was "turned" over about 150 years ago by the gold miners of the day. It is very alkaline and almost pure shale where the site was back-filled. Possibly a contributing factor for my lack lustre response with my "Don".

I am also currently winding some new coils using a heavier gauge wire. Will post a photo when complete. Also, I have built a rudimentary spark gap given that I have been churning through the GDT's. Too much current I suspect.

Excellent thread for the persistent type of builder!

Regards

Dwane

Well, apparently even a normal household ground CAN be good enough if enough other factors are in play. My one positive experiment was done using the third-prong ground connection to the household wiring. Even just going out and watering the soil around the ground rod will likely help significantly. If you read Tesla's "Colorado Springs Notes", you can see the fits that he had trying to get a good ground in the rocky soil out there. At times they had to leave the water running continuously to get a low resistance ground.

The soil at my location is limestone rock mixed with highly impermeable clay, very far from ideal for a ground. I once installed a small solar power system, and for lightning protection I dug a large hole to install the ground rod in, about a foot wide by about six and half feet deep. I would have gone the whole eight feet, but I hit a second rock layer at six and a half and I was NOT going to take the huge time and effort to try busting rock at that depth. As it was, I probably spent ten hours or more of work digging that hole. I put a standard copper-clad steel rod in the middle of the hole, and then backfilled with a conductive mixture of 75% gypsum (calcium sulfate), 20% sodium sulfate, and 5% sodium chloride. This is a recipe I obtained from some military handbook about grounding and lightning protection for communication equipment that I can no longer find, but I remember the proportions. It greatly reduces the ground resistance by effectively increasing the diameter of the ground rod from half an inch to a foot, but over time it gets less effective as the salts slowly leach into the soil. Pure sodium chloride is more available but far worse at leaching and more toxic to surrounding plants.

Unfortunately, this hole and ground rod isn't near my shop building where I have my electronics workbench. What I really need is a very good ground immediately behind the building, where I can bring in a ground strap right through a conduit. Due to the difficulties of digging in the rock here, I'm not even going to attempt to dig another hole by hand, my back isn't as good as it used to be. I have started checking prices on equipment rentals and it's possible to get a backhoe or excavator for well under $100 an hour. With a good-sized machine, someone experienced can make short work of digging me a hole about 4 feet cubed. Then I just need to source an old truck radiator, a copper one so that I can solder a ground strap onto it.

If you read all of Don's available writings and watch the conference videos in time sequence, you can actually see the progression Don went through as he tried to understand the technology himself. He must have gotten something to work fairly early on but still didn't have a good understanding of it. He called it the "Earth Electrical System" and talked about soil conditions and geological maps and the energy coming from the earth. Later on he moved away from this idea, and toward the end of his career we see him zapping capacitors with Tesla coils and talking about the "Ambient Energy Generator". It's clear to me now that this is the actual mechanism (diagrammed as the "ambient energy generator"), but the earth grounding conditions matter a lot as to how easy it is to tap it. So my next strategy is to spend some of my project budget and actually hire a backhoe to dig a huge hole for a much, much better ground. Combined with this I'm going back to the spark-excited Tesla coil arrangement with much higher voltages than the solid-state CW rig I've been using for experimentation. Properly tuned I can get sparks up to maybe 4 or 5 inches (10 to 15 cm for our metric friends), which is not bad for a tiny low-power benchtop coil.

[med.3012]

studying the nature phenomena can solve great problem, instead of digging in the earth for good earth ground which is very important it's better to dig in the phenomena itself.. one of the interesting phenomena is lightning!

strong and immense lightning is linked with hurricanes, Don smith said lightning is over unity effect this also alert a lots of inventors to think about power from the sky, the following is a satellite image of IRMA hurricane :





the red arrows show a strong lightning in the edge and in the center as if they linked together at the same time! now they try to better understand the lightning to predict the hurricane,

electricity is a spin phenomena, spinning is a common behavior that can be found in atom in tornado; earth , sun , planets , galaxies .. etc ..

spinning the electron make it move around the wire which allow super conductivity to be produced in room temperature , instead of working with normal electron we need vortex electron :




this is ring electrons what we need, we could produce such electrons if energy balance is achieved .. exactly as permanent magnet, the phenomena we are using until now is no longer needed ! instead of spinning the magnet to produce electricity we need to spin the electron itself !! the needed geometry can be seeing in hurricane or galaxy.

[ricards]

electricity is a spin phenomena, spinning is a common behavior that can be found in atom in tornado; earth , sun , planets , galaxies .. etc ..

spinning the electron make it move around the wire which allow super conductivity to be produced in room temperature , instead of working with normal electron we need vortex electron :

Hi Med,

Just wondering, how did you come up to the conclusion that Electricity is a spin phenomenon?.

Hi Tswift,

that looks like a really huge job on the "Grounding"... I've been meaning to ask this..
What really is the significance of the "Good Ground Connection"?...
If I have a system with 80% efficiency with a concrete ground.. could I get close to 100% (or more) with a good dirt ground?..
though I could test this out myself but would be limited to somewhat next year.. the place I am now is an urban and no more open dirt ground is available (all are concrete)..
in the place I will be moving would have a dirt ground..
appreciate if anyone could answer.

[med.3012]

Hi Med,

Just wondering, how did you come up to the conclusion that Electricity is a spin phenomenon?.

Hi Tswift,

that looks like a really huge job on the "Grounding"... I've been meaning to ask this..
What really is the significance of the "Good Ground Connection"?...
If I have a system with 80% efficiency with a concrete ground.. could I get close to 100% (or more) with a good dirt ground?..
though I could test this out myself but would be limited to somewhat next year.. the place I am now is an urban and no more open dirt ground is available (all are concrete)..
in the place I will be moving would have a dirt ground..
appreciate if anyone could answer.

Hello ricards ,


it's known the electron has a little magnetic field but there's a condition for electron to make such a tiny magnetic field, it must spin around its axis, the circulation of electrons in a coil produce also a magnetic field along the coil , for more info about electron spin please watch this short video :


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl-zUmeYj74


the magnetic field around the wire make a circle which is the low energy preferred direction of a group of electrons , these groups do spin to produce such a circles, this phenomena is composed and complicated but IMO electrons spin is very important !

[ricards]

Hello ricards ,

it's known the electron has a little magnetic field but there's a condition for electron to make such a tiny magnetic field, it must spin around its axis, the circulation of electrons in a coil produce also a magnetic field along the coil , for more info about electron spin please watch this short video :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl-zUmeYj74

the magnetic field around the wire make a circle which is the low energy preferred direction of a group of electrons , these groups do spin to produce such a circles, this phenomena is composed and complicated but IMO electrons spin is very important !

Hi Med,

Thanks for clarifying, however.. I guess its really hard for me to grasp the electron spin theory (though I haven't watched the video yet)... whenever an explanation about atomic stuff is presented its as if its in a different realm.. things like centrifugal, and centripetal does not exist anymore.. I could not come up a seaming picture of from our world into the atomic..

Its easier for me to visualize things from cosmos light years into meters or inch scale (there are even videos of it) but from meters to nano or even pico.. it seems there's always a Missing picture that links them..
anyway off topic.. thanks for your time.

[med.3012]

Hi Med,

Thanks for clarifying, however.. I guess its really hard for me to grasp the electron spin theory (though I haven't watched the video yet)... whenever an explanation about atomic stuff is presented its as if its in a different realm.. things like centrifugal, and centripetal does not exist anymore.. I could not come up a seaming picture of from our world into the atomic..

Its easier for me to visualize things from cosmos light years into meters or inch scale (there are even videos of it) but from meters to nano or even pico.. it seems there's always a Missing picture that links them..
anyway off topic.. thanks for your time.

you are welcome ,

[tswift]

What really is the significance of the "Good Ground Connection"?...
If I have a system with 80% efficiency with a concrete ground.. could I get close to 100% (or more) with a good dirt ground?..
though I could test this out myself but would be limited to somewhat next year.. the place I am now is an urban and no more open dirt ground is available (all are concrete)..
in the place I will be moving would have a dirt ground..
appreciate if anyone could answer.

Well, remember that all this is essentially just an untested theory on my part in my ongoing attempt to make sense of Don's work. But I do know and can prove with my small benchtop Tesla coil that, for reasons that are not yet clear, electricity does seem to care where along a voltage gradient it is. This is my experiment where the sparks turn white in the very middle of a several-inch long spark, just for a few millimeters in the very center. There's no obvious reason it should happen and yet it does, for some reason the electricity changes character in a visible fashion. This effect is demonstrable and repeatable.

I need to make some graphics to explain this concept better, but that will have to wait until I have some more time to do it. But if I am right, then the problem that the vast majority of people having building Don Smith-like devices and getting them to work, has very little to do with the build particulars of the device (that is, once you get the HVM driving the coils and at least some power transfer). If your ground is not good enough you will never see any OU from the device because you won't be getting cold electricity. Just improving the ground might be all it takes. As with all good science, I intend to prove this point by demonstration, so I'm calling around for prices on a backhoe service to dig me a big hole so I can bury a copper grounding plate. Then I will resume my bench testing, and hopefully I can prove that the exact same device which is not OU with a household ground, can go OU with a much better ground, at least that's my current working theory.

One of the most puzzling aspects to the Don Smith mystery is why there have been a few people who claimed to have success. If you read this whole thread from the beginning, you will find perhaps four or five who claimed that the magic showed up and it worked as intended. In no case did they seem to do anything all that different from the rest of us who have been trying various configurations and variations without success. Speaking for myself, I have build HUNDREDS of different bench test configurations and there are very few ideas I haven't tried, but nothing exotic has ever happened with them. However, I did have that one successful test where clearly something different and special happened, and it took no more than zapping a battery with a high voltage through a spark gap. So assuming these people are telling the truth, what is it that's making the difference? Why do some people (quite a small fraction) seem to get results when everyone else doesn't? The answer could be as simple as them living where the soil conductivity is extraordinarily high, so even a building wiring ground produces good results. Too bad none of them seem to still be around to chat with the rest of us, they seem to get confused and leave when no one else can reproduce their results. It would be a useful test for any such person to take the device to a different location (preferably miles away in a different soil type) and see if the device also works.

Also, if my understanding is correct (unproven) then it should be possible to defeat poor grounding by increasing voltage enough. Assuming Don's suitcase device was genuine (also unproven) then he clearly had it worked out well enough to use any old building wiring ground and get results.

I think the evidence clearly points to the fact that the grounding is critically important. Did you ever stop to wonder why many of Don's schematics have adjustable ground coupling? Did you ever wonder why, in all of Kapanadze's videos, they make a very big point of showing off a separate grounding provision at the beginning of the video? I also once stumbled across a translated Russian schematic of a very Don Smith-like device, and on the schematic was clearly written "the ground must be good, else the device not work". This project has cost me plenty to date and I'm not quitting now, so what's a few hundred more dollars for a backhoe to dig a hole and find out?