Would putting the cavity at a partial vacuum allow the em waves to travel better and more efficiently?

If you used magnets at the top and bottom, that might create a plasma cavity internally to help guide the waves.

There's some work with using plasma waveguides with lasers.

If I should get a Terrawatt laser in my hands some day, I´ll try this :-D
They write it´s to guide high energy laser beams by a plasma. Seems, it doesn´t have much to do with an EMdrive. interesting though, although I just took a short look and don´t understand all aspects of it. Thanx for the link, I´ll take some more time to read.

Wouldn't we all want a terra watt laser. Lmao. 

The point of the links was to show the same idea being used in other fields, not the implementation. 

If the chamber is under vacuum and you're pumping high energy microwaves it'll be in a plasma anyways. This could actually hurt, but if you could use ring magnets at the top and bottom to direct the plasma to create a cavity.

A plasma container could/should have almost infinite q.

Wrong?

Thanks for your time and consideration. 

or a hydrogen maser in stead of a laser..

Has there been thought of integrating something like a Koch island patch resonator in the cavity design to increase the q-value?

A fractal cavity? Interesting idea. It would be great to have a simulation on that one. I learned that many people do simulations with the MEEP software. I didn´t try it yet - it would take long time for me o get inside it. We focus on building an actual proven design and try to get something which is above noise.
Maybe someone is interested in making a theoretical analysis of this idea? Would be exciting.

Go for contact with the piston if possible. I would almost say go for contact on all sides. However it might be hard to accomplish that with your current design.

Was going to perpose something like a bering design to the rim of the piston that way you could achieve the most contact with the piston, but also get the best non-fiction setup

We´ll try a contact plate with a big threaded hole for a screw

Have you considered using an interferometer setup to measure microscopic displacement?  Would that allow cleaner, more accurate measurement of the force than a load cell?  The first setup I thought of was placing the EMDrive on the end of a long thin pole.  Tiny force would create a very small displacement of the end of the pole.  

Another option would be your floating platform.  Imagine floating the EMDrive on a few air-filled drinking straws, like an oil rig.  Might need a weight at the bottom for balance.  Back of the envelope calculation:

If the straws have cross-sectional area of 1 cm^2, and you can measure their vertical displacement with the interferometer to within 10 nm, then that equates to 1 microgram of water being displaced.  1 microgram in earth gravity is 9.807 nano-Newtons of force.  

With some extra work, you could take advantage of additive force as well.  This floating system would tend to oscillate vertically at some natural frequency (0.1-1 Hz, rough guess, depending on weight of platform), like a boat.  If you pulsed the EMDrive at the same frequency, then the displacement would be additive, much like your rotating platform.  

Using an interferometer may have other advantages as well, the laser light wouldn't suffer any electrical interference from the EMDrive itself, so could be a cleaner signal.  One complication would be if the laser light photons actually put pressure on the platform.  I have no idea how to calculate whether that would be a concern at these scales or not.  Another complication is floating this thing in water makes vacuum testing it really hard.  You'd have to float the whole vacuum chamber.  It'd be doable, but a pain.  

I'm just brainstorming with you, just in case the load cell doesn't give you nice enough data.  Nice work so far and best of luck with the rest of it!

Thanx for your ideas, they are great. We made floating tests before. The problem were tiny forces coming from the electrical wires to the RF source interacting with the magnets under the water tank which kept the platform of drifting away to the walls of the tank. Even 30mA were enough to displace the platform into one direction, regardless the orientation of the EMdrive. Other electrical sources in the house caused unpredictable displacements as well so we could only get implication of thrust rather than a proof.
But the floating platform is very promising.

The load cell seems to loose its accuracy in the milligram range.

I did the board anyway in case we can figure out how to make it more accurate.

The interferrometry sounds interesting. I´ll need to study that technique as I never used it before.

Yeah, I've never used interferometry for measurements myself either.  I've made holograms though, which is essentially the same thing.  Various homemade designs have shown up on Hackaday though, those should give a nice starting point:  http://hackaday.com/?s=interferometer

The equipment required is pretty minimal, a laser pointer, prism, mirror, and camera.  And some video processing software (I believe there are open source packages, I'd have to search around for a bit).  It can definitely be done.  The 10nm accuracy is a rough guess.  Wikipedia says state of the art systems get down to 1nm accuracy.  Worst case would be 700nm for a red laser, 400nm for blue, since that's one whole wavelength.  Even if your camera could only distinguish two images (perfect interference, and shifted by 1/2 wavelength), that gets you down to 200-350nm resolution, or about 20-35 micrograms (I think).  Not sure how that compares to your load cell, it sounds pretty good, but the laser would hopefully be less prone to noise from electrical interference.  

That said, interferometers are touchy things too, since they are so ridiculously sensitive.  Just to give you an idea, our holograms had to be made in a sealed, unmanned basement, since the air disturbance of us breathing would mess up the interference pattern.  We had to set it all up, then let the room air settle for an hour, then remotely trigger the exposure.  We could easily pick up large trucks driving about a block away despite having vibration dampened tables (they weren't as nice as lab-grade air bearing tables though).  

That's amazing that the RF supply lines were interacting with your submerged magnets!  Pretty wild how accurate you guys are getting with this stuff.  The other advantage to measuring vertical displacement is that you could actually anchor the platform to the side wall with a couple knife edge lever arms.  They just need to swing vertically with no resistance, but they could help limit the horizontal floating around, without any magnets involved they shouldn't interfere too much. 

Another consideration is making the two laser paths as close to identical as possible.  This will minimize errors due to air currents/temperature/density changes and external vibrations.  You might even have two floating mirrored platforms next to each other, one with a dummy microwave load and the other with the real EmDrive.  The interferometer will only show differences in the laser path length to each platform.  If they are indistinguishable except for the shape of the cavity on the EmDrive, then that should really help isolate the force due to the drive itself.  

There may be other better ways than a floating platform, I'll do more brainstorming.  Hanging the EmDrive from a string like a pendulum might be easier.  Let me know if I can be of any help if you decide to try the interferometer thing, good luck!

Another back of the envelope calculation for a pendulum setup.  If the EmDrive weighed about 100 grams, and hung on a 1 meter string, 1 nanometer displacement should equate to 1 nano-Newtons of restoring force being counteracted by the drive.  That should give you really nice accuracy, if I did my math right, haha.  

I checked the link you sent me of the simple interferometer. That´s amazing! Thanx you so much. I ordered the parts, we are going to try this method. The load cell approach will not do it - at least I got an USB milligram scale now, which would be damn expensive when having to buy it :-D

@movax This was more brainstorming.

The existence of a material with Tc of >164K even in such extreme conditions suggests that other hydrogenated materials (ie Pd:H3S) might superconduct at slightly less than 203K but maybe more as they are a more rigid lattice.

Its also worth noting that my earlier research shortly after Prof.Pablo published his work on apparent RTS in graphite suggested that under certain conditions there might be a way to dope graphene with heavy metals such as lead (Pb) and in fact later work by other scientists proved that the electrons behaved anomalously under this case.

It might be possible to make it work with cuprates as well and a lot of research has been done to increase Tc here.

Eck has suggested using high dielectric constants to increase Tc and has promising results though a very small UF.

Hi, if you're interested I have some parts here (namely 24GHz Gunnplexers).

I also have some ideas to make a superconducting cavity in a similar way to your Shapeways one, however this time coating YBCO inside the cavity.

There are better superconductors now, one focus of my research is making new materials that work at nearly room temperature which is seeming more and more likely after the 203K H3S@1.5M atm result reported from Max Planck.

I read recenty abut these new superconductors. But it sounds quite impossible to get this material. If you´re able to get or produce it - good luck, this would be incredible. So are you brainstorming now or do you have access to this equipment? 1,5Matm is very much - there are not many devices like that on earth.

According the RF sources: I just soldered our new tuneable source, capable of delivering a few hundred milliwatts. It´s tuneble over a wide range so we hope to tune into resonance. There are new integrated ICs on the market making it easier to build one, so thanx for the offer, but we have already what we need.
We will post the STLs for our cavity if you want to produce one.

I don't fully understood why that platform is floating in one of your previous posts... magnets on either end or is the drive itself achieving lift?

The floating is achieved by a digitally controlled electromagnet.
The purpose of letting the platform float is to reduce friction for beeing able to measure tiny forces. The EMdrive forces are - if they occur - very very small, especially for the Baby EMdrive, so a rotatiion or lift could not be achieved by the drive alone.
For our next test we will use direct thrust measurement by digitally oversampling a load-cell voltage.

Thanks for the reply, I am really excited to see your upcoming test runs. As I understand it, you have not actually fully assembled the drive as of yet- assuming I'm not mistaken, do you have a timeline for actual tests for this device?

The new assembly is still in progress. I hope to finish the interferometry setup next week.  If no problems occur with the new RF board, it will also be ready next week.
The cavity assembly is almost finished except the small endplate cap. We want a better conductivity, so we need a new endplate.
So I hope we will be able to deliver first results in about 3 weeks.

Thanks for the update and explanation, I greatly look forward to seeing your test results (not that I will understand everything). It is inspiring and exciting to see experiments like this in real time and by the hands of everyday engineers interested in sharing their results for analysis, replication and discussion with everyone. It is disheartening to think how may projects there must be locked away behind militaristic or industrial curtains of secrecy that will never see the light of day. Good luck and good work so far!

Grzegorz Maj posted this on youtube. Could this be a simple explanation of how the EMdrive works?
That´s great - add one dimension :)
A 3 dimensional wave system acting on a 2D cavity -> A 4 dimensional wave system acting on a 3D cavity

Sorry, wrote the wrong email to my last account. Keep forgetting that it isn't @google.com bit actually @gmail.com anyway. Cool, please do tell me about the trials with the silver and also how the non conductive coat test goes as I think everyone is overlooking a possible and powerful explication as to how the emdrives work. If I am correct then you might actually see an increase of force.

Ok. We´ll post all results in the project log and share the raw data in the repository.
We will start with basic experiments first and see if we get any measurable thrust. If we do, we´ll continue with nonconductive dielectrics.

Hello, I have an experiment I would like to suggest, coating the endplate with a non conductive skin on the outside. It is just something I have always wondered with the emdrives, as if you go by NASA'S tests, the drive made less force in a vacuum then it did in air. Always wanted to know why the disgrephency.

Idea 1: There was a thermal effect associated with air

Idea2: A dielectric slows down the wave speed which may result in lower force on the desired endplate -> higher net force

Idea3: eg some molceules resonate at certain frequencies (like water near 2.4 GHz -> microwave oven or ammonia at 24GHz)

Unfortunately I am just keen as EE and CS, but trying to learn new stuff... also needed for the EMdrive

The nonconductive dielectric on one side is a good point, thanx for that. If our experiments work we will also check out the dielectrics.

Idea4: Copper oxidized inside of the cavity and Q collapsed, hence thrust decreased, between ambient air and vacuum tests (like Tajmar's experiments).

Idea5: The speed of light in vacuum is not the same as in air, so if you properly tune the length between plates to achieve full resonance in ambient air, and let this setting untouched afterwards, the cavity could not be as resonant in a vacuum. Thus less thrust.

Idea6: Shawyer's conjecture of "motor" and "generator" modes: the EmDrive will not register a significant acceleration unless initially motivated to do so by mechanical vibrations (of unspecified magnitude and frequency) to produce initial acceleration in the direction pointing from the big base to the small base. If this conjecture is valid, the reason why much lower thrust is measured in vacuum is because the EmDrive had no vibration to trigger such initial condition.

Good hypotheses.

The experiment I'd like to see involves a nicely-leveled air hockey table.

The widget you've shown looks like it could be completely "sealed" into what's effectively a large "Air Hockey Puck". 

An air hockey table (for those that don't know) has a zillion little holes with air coming out, so the pucks are effectively little hovercars. Friction: Exceedingly low. Lower than all the discussions of linear motion I've seen proposed to date. 

The default 'came with the table' source of air will need to be boosted to overcome the weight of the device. Then a short set of experiments to show that any movement is not just Brownian motion. ... Then add a servo to aim the cavity for steering. :D

Funny, i thought of that too. But the air disturbations are larger than the expected force of the drive. Should the force reach the millinewton range, I´ll think about it :)

Mock me: I missed the magnetic bearing. :D

(Started from the bell-jar demonstration video, assumed it was hanging, my bad. )

I love that your device is small. The 'onboard power and emitter' is a gigantic plus, even as it comes with 'lower power'.

This enables "Totally sealed device" and "EM Shielded device" (as you move from remote control to onboard micro). Both seem like they're going to be necessary in the end. 

Yes. In a few weeks we want to have a multimode version ready with tuneable frequency and flexible antenna- and endplate position.
If we get measurable thrust with that we´ll produce a flight version to be put into a cubesat.

In case you missed this...  

http://inhabitat.com/an-egyptian-teenager-has-created-a-next-generation-quantum-space-propulsion-system/

Working prototype or it didn´t happen. There´s so much of this stuff on the internet and it´s becoming more and more.

Most of it is esoterical stuff which is blocking working prototypes from becoming seen and it´s hard to filter out what´s real or what´s fake, what´s an ongoing research and what´s just esoterical noise.

I´ll invest time into making the EMdrive work. I am open to another ideas too and willing to try them out, but I am very sceptical in the first place.

Link to yesterdays spaceshow podcast with the physisist Jim Woodward regarding the Mach effect which is a similar propellent less drive and some mention of EM drive which may be relevant/useful to this group... http://www.gigadial.net/public/station/11253

Can this be helpful to detect sub pixel movements?

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_rubinstein_see_invisible_motion_hear_silent_sounds_cool_creepy_we_can_t_decide

At 40mW (0.04W) power input, the Baby EMDrive thrust is at best 5uN (assuming Q of 25,000) or 0.0005g. SnowFlake weights 0.003g or 6x more. Even EagleWorks could not measure such a small thrust.

EMDrive in a computer or lap top.

True. But the experiments will help to develop a better measuring system for future design. I designed a new tuneable RF source, and we will make the cavity tuneable. Let´s see if we get better results.

Keep up the good work!

Which end of the resonator is pointing forward in your "prograde" measurements?  The large end of the cone or the small end?    In the youtube video it looks like the large end is leading.

Can you confirm which direction the emdrive was oriented (large diameter or small diameter leading) in your prograde and retrograde tests?  Different models predict a different direction of the force for an empty emdrive with no dielectric inserts, so it would be very helpful to know in which direction you measured the force.

This type of propulsion was proposed by many other scientist, notable one was Andrei Sakharov. As well, prof. Dr. John Branderburg from US.

But why be satisfied with a mock up, when you can check the real thing. Please check this thread and download the included .PDF:

http://www.overunity.com/15514/disappointingly-practical-and-simple-em-propulsion-with-off-the-shelf-parts/#.VXlkPkYeqgR

Complete handwaving verbiage. Please cite ONE paper where A. D. Sakharov talked about anything similar to EmDrive or gravity-induced by Poynting vector. There are simply none. I give you a clue, start your homework from there: 

http://www.amazon.com/D-Sakharov-Collected-Scientific-Works/dp/0824717147 

And bringing together that prestigious Russian scientist with the guy who recently asserted Mars' civilization nuked itself long ago? Bleh. Besides his "work" has nothing in common with Shawyer's!

As for the rest, please stop spreading bullshit here, where others try hard doing real science. The conspiracies sites and documents you presented are anything but science.

As per Pauli: You're not even wrong, sir.

That´s the problem. Anything science fiction-like is beeing pushed on the internet in a religious way. Most is bullshit, but there are some pears in between. Luckily, the EMdrive made it, because the Chinese decided to build it officially in an university project.
Maybe some other great ideas didn´t have this privilege.
It´s verx important that independent people do research, no matter if they have millions of dollars or just a few tools in the garage. Universities are really really afraid of loosing reputation, so they usually stay away of projects like this.

Hi. I'm an A2 level student looking to build an EMD for my Extended Project Qualification. You can reach me at euan.french@ntlworld.com . I'm looking for more information on how you constructed the EMD, especially relevant equations and how to find the resonant frequency. It would mean a lot to me if you could help, and hopefully as almost-colleagues we can bring this technology forward another step.

We provide what we manage to provide between daytime job and family life.
We do it in our free time.

That's fine, I'm not asking you to take this up as a full time research project (I can't either as it runs alongside my school time) but I really need some guidance in how you set your thruster up specifically finding things like the resonant frequency.

Cheers.

Concerning the rotation rate measurements what's the main sources of noise for the tests?

I think lorentz forces and air resistance would cause the major disturbance.