Read "Tesla On his work with alternating currents." Tesla was able to transmit electricity efficiently using standing waves in the earth. The engineering precis

Read "Tesla On his work with alternating currents." Tesla was able to transmit electricity efficiently using standing waves in the earth. The engineering precision required to do this is still unmatched today, and in fact it's because even tesla had such difficulty tuning all of the required parameters that radio in the sense it is used today, which requires tuning fewer parameters, won out in the 1910s. If you read "tesla on his work with ac" you will see his transmitters could be tuned to close to 100% efficiency, minus heat and spark losses from the power plant at the transmitter. This has been replicated using single ground wires instead of the earth at a small scale and at higher frequencies recently in various open source hardware forums on the Internet. Note these smaller devices use higher frequencies which generate much more rf radiation than tesla suggests, thus not being able to achieve the efficiencies tesla was talking about -- tesla was working with a 50 foot diameter by 10 foot tall primary and secondary, plus an extra coil about 8 feet tall and wide and frequencies around 50khz, pretty much unused today. The secondary and extra coil in the tesla arrangement take the place of straight antennas that are in use for normal communications today. The transmission is effected through the ground, not through the air. If the device is emitting radio waves, then it is not a tesla magnifying transmitter. Most tesla coils built today are hopelessly out of tune... They have far too many turns and are far too tall in comparison to diameter. Each additional turn adds capacitance, and the narrow diameters used make for a small inductance. The capacitances are far too high and inductances too low in these arrangements, and thus they need extremely inefficient drivers. "Colorado Springs Notes" is of course the definitive resource for this material, although "tesla on his work with ac" exposes the concepts in easier to understand language. The exact schematics and dimensions are given for the Colorado springs experiment. Scaling it down is not trivial, but in the late 80s golka built an exact replica and performed successful experiments.