I have begun a little practical thinking on how to conduct some experiments. A few junk-box items have been located that include:Small 12V lead acid battery. Quite enough "oomph" to arc a pencil lead for a few seconds.
Variable capacitor ~ 70- 750 pF
2.5 mH coil, 200 Turns on a 10 mm ferrite bar.
Microwave oven transformer, or an old lamp ballast (to use as a choke between the battery and arc setup).
The LC combo tunes down to about 190 kHz. Being home made, modification is easy, if required. The next move will be some simple engineering to arrange the arc electrodes.
I'll maintain updates on this if there is any interest. I think even the briefest flicker of an arc oscillation would be considered a success. Daydreaming fun, a LowFER would be, difficult and impractical - goodness knows how to know limit input power to the final stage to 1W. Perhaps a negative resistance oscillator could work here?
More soon,
73s
Ed