Chris,
 
I’ll have to bow out because in my present very limited physical condition and that of my wife after her stroke, I just don’t have any time anymore.
 
You will get some good info from Bedini and from Walt. They were there, and they are both very good people.
 
Sweet did change his original VTA midstream, particularly when he did get the self-resonance trapped in his barium ferrite magnets. He also scanned the surface for the H-field strength variations of the magnetic field, which if it varied more than about 7 to 10 %, meant that the magnet would not hold the deep nucleus self-oscillation, but would die out. Self-oscillation in magnetic materials is known today, but the trick is to get it at 60 Hertz etc., as Sweet could do, and to get it deeply enough that it produces negative EM energy instead of positive EM energy. Sweet could predetermine the frequency of the self-oscillation he would get after activation, and with Walt’s unit he got much more precision in his activation success.
 
In a French project after Sweet’s death, my French partner got self-resonance in the nuclei of carefully selected barium ferrite magnets to last for up to five weeks, but I’m under nondisclosure on that project. Two or three other folks got it to last for awhile, from a few minutes to days. During the time the self-resonance lasted, all those folks had equipment that did exhibit the VTA effect. Trouble was, the activations were not stable enough to last. Sweet’s activation would hold unless shock or other substantial disturbance occurred, in which case the magnets promptly lost their self-oscillation and their oscillating magnetic fields, and became simple “static” permanent magnets with “static” fields. Interestingly, the Russians then were shooting artificial earthquakes with their scalar interferometers, and the VTA would dramatically react to the scalar interferometry. For some years Sweet could tell me exactly which quake was natural and which was artificial. A close artificial quake would in fact sometimes explode his conditioned magnets like hand grenades, while they would sit right on top of a normal quake with no problem.
 
To understand the VTA at all, you simply must learn something about negative energy. Forget the “waxing eloquent” epistles of cold energy and all that in the internet chat groups, but go rigorously search out real physics information on true negative energy in physics. If you haven’t read any physics papers on negative energy, you cannot and will not understand the VTA’s negative energy conditioning or its negative energy output.  Compared to positive energy, negative energy is a dramatic alteration of spacetime and of the vacuum virtual particle flux itself.
 
Nuclear binding energy is negative energy, which is very different from the positive energy we are all taught to think in terms of. Check it out. If one gets self-oscillation in the barium nuclei, one is getting self-oscillating negative binding energy of the resonating nucleons. Similar self-oscillations in positive energy in thin film magnetic materials – including some of the barite compounds -- is known today in the domains, but it is a small effect and not even thought of for “power” applications. Nevertheless it is known and used.
 
The later versions of the VTA that I worked on did indeed exhibit oscillating fields from the conditioned magnets, instead of static and stationary fields. I placed a shim stock on one of those conditioned magnets, so that in the waving magnetic field of the magnet it rocked to and fro against the air resistance, continually fanning air and doing mechanical work. I locked that magnet with its self-waving shim stock in a safe for 24 hours, and the next day when I opened the safe the shim stock was still waving, steadily doing mechanical work on the air by “fanning” it. To get the conditioning to “take” deeply enough (i.e., to reach past the magnetic domains into the barium nuclei), Sweet did preheat the magnets in an electric oven before “shooting” them for the activation. This heating temporarily “softened” the domains, so the “shooting” of the activation would penetrate beyond them and into the nuclei. For a successful activation, it was the nuclei (the nucleons) themselves that were shocked into self-resonance at the design conditioning frequency, hence the negative energy output of the VTA.
 
Note that fields at much smaller distances – such as in the nuclei among nucleons – are far more powerful than the fields we experience in normal EM circuits. So very powerful forces are being manipulated in the nuclei, resulting in good strong fields in the surrounding macroscopic world.
 
Negative energy does indeed produce antigravity rather than normal gravity. A Dirac hole is gravitationally repelled by positive mass, and in turn the hole exerts back-repulsion or “antigravity” force upon that positive mass. Hence the fact that the Sweet VTA, once pushed to high enough output, could produce real measurable (and significant) antigravity by repulsing the earth beneath it. The successful demonstration of a reduction of the unit’s weight by 90% was a decisive confirmation of the negative energy aspects.
 
You do not get antigravity from positive energy components and processes. You get antigravity from negative energy components and processes.
 
The Sweet VTA was also a derivative of the Gabriel Kron negative resistor, which during the 1930s and early 40s was developed by Kron on a GE Navy contract utilizing  a large simulator called the “network analyzer” at Stanford University. Sweet was actually a protégé of the great Gabriel Kron, who took a liking to him and had GE (their employer) do good things for Sweet, such as send him to university to get his master’s degree in electrical engineering. However, later parts of the project at Stanford involved highly classified electromagnetic vulnerability and ECM work, so all references to it were obliterated, including all records of Sweet’s MS at the university. But if you watched him work the equations etc., you could easily see his ability was much greater than the BS level. Sweet was also a transformer expert, and had noticed unusual phenomena in certain types of transformers under certain circumstances – including self-resonance and self-oscillation.
 
Here’s a small overview of negative energy, and not the usual arm-waving one so often sees.
 
Negative energy involves free Dirac Sea holes as source charges, so that their fields and potentials are negative energy electromagnetic fields and potentials. This is something that classical EM and electrical engineering discard and do not address. But negative energy is known in physics, even occurring in the Shroedinger equation. Dirac detested negative energy, and much of his electron theory work was in an attempt to try to get rid of it. He failed, but he steered all the physicists away from the persistent negative mass-energy holes producing negative energy EM fields and potentials, remarking that well, such holes  would be observed as positrons. That is not true at all, although it is still largely believed. In solid state physics, the hole eats an electron in the material lattice, leaving an excess positive charge in the material lattice because one negative charge disappeared from it. This lattice positron is the one chased and used by the semiconductor theory and other folks. It is not a persistent (at least momentarily) Dirac sea hold devoid of its usual electron filler, before interaction with a material lattice.
 
In Dirac Sea theory, the vacuum is a sea of such holes filled with electrons. The holes have negative energy (and negative energy fields) and the filling electrons have positive energy (and positive energy fields). Hence a “filled hole” is just a piece of inert vacuum, where the positive and negative energy fields sum to a vector zero resultant, and the two masses sum to a net zero mass.
 
 A real Dirac hole, with its usual filler electron popped out of it, has negative mass, while the positron has positive mass. One produces antigravity, the other produces normal gravity. No way can they be called the same. The reason they still use the positron is that, once the free hole is produced, it moves backward in the emf of the circuit, but it also “eats” the first electron it meets. No radiation results; that IS NOT pair annihilation which has been defined as positron and electron meeting. When a positron (positive energy) and electron (positive energy) meet and annihilate, the POSITIVE ENERGY of both remains, and energy conservation requires it be emitted as EM radiation, which it is. When an electron (positive energy) meets a hole and combines with it (falls into it), the positive energy and negative energy sum to a net zero energy, so there is no radiation. Instead, you just get a Dirac hole filled with an electron, which is just the normal Dirac sea representation of the “empty” vacuum.
 
That’s about as much as I can help with because of my nondisclosure agreements and my physical situation, with its severe limitation on my time. I just can’t take on any additional projects at all. But I hope it helps.
 
Good luck for success on your project!
 
Best wishes,
Tom Bearden