Steve Hilsz, Director of EPD Laboratories, Inc., passed away in the early morning hours of March 1, 2026 at the age of 81 at Hospice of the Valley in Surprise, Arizona.
Those who followed the live calls with Eric Dollard knew Steve as the legendary “Glom Meister” — the man behind the famous Glom Locker, an extraordinary collection of vintage surplus parts that made many of the EPD Labs projects possible. Steve spent years working in the surplus industry and had a gift for sourcing the exact components needed — things that simply can’t be found anymore through normal channels. Eric Dollard knew Steve for years, and many of the critical items that made EPD Labs’ work in the electrical sciences a reality came directly from Steve’s expertise and connections.
Steve was born in San Francisco, California on January 20, 1945. After graduating from Galileo High School, he earned an Electronic Technician Aide degree from Heald College. He became a renowned expert and author in the field of antique telephone restoration and wiring, running his own business, VTS Industrial. Before starting his own company, he worked for the local telephone company in Salome, Arizona. He was known among collectors as a “friend of the collector,” specializing in repairing rotary dials and sourcing hard-to-find parts for vintage projects. He was a member of the Antique Telephone Collectors Association and the Telephone Collectors International.
Steve’s passion for restoration extended well beyond telephones and radios. He was equally captivated by naval and industrial history, often working aboard decommissioned warships and destroyers, salvaging precious metals as a hands-on hobby. This rare combination of meticulous detail and bold exploration reflected his lifelong curiosity and love of understanding how things were built. That same curiosity and generosity is what brought him into the world of EPD Laboratories, where his contributions were indispensable.
He married Barbara Cornell on June 7, 1969 in Hornitos, California. They remained married for nearly 57 years.
Steve was an avid reader and loved music. He and Barbara loved going to concerts and going out to dinner. He had a remarkable breadth of knowledge and could strike up a meaningful conversation with anyone. Curious by nature, he never stopped learning and enthusiastically embraced each new wave of technology, all while cherishing his love of antiques.
He is survived by his wife, Barbara Hilsz; his daughter, Lori (Hilsz) Shueman; his grandchildren, Alexander Shueman and Molly Shueman; and his sisters, Carol Crowell and Barbara Warda.
Eric Dollard and Connor Fisher walk through the new TCS bench setup at EPD Laboratories in Tonopah, Nevada.
The Ground Problem
The site has three things that we would be tempted to refer to as ground — only one actually is.
The telluric transmission coil transmits through a large water tank buried underground. That tank measures 1 ohm against the power line neutral. Because the coil is actively transmitting through this tank; it is hot — not ground. A second tank is buried nearby to the first, but has an induced current from the first tank resulting from the telluric coil transmission; thus they are electrically coupled making the second tank hot. Also not ground.
The power company’s so called ground is also not legitimate since it is bonded to the high voltage neutral at the main panel. Due to some national dictate most transformer connections are being bypassed; connecting the customer directly to the high voltage neutral on the secondary side of the power line transformer. Driving a couple ground rods at the main panel do not in any way reconcile this issue; they are simply there as a result of misguided electrical codes, and in a sense are “just for show.”
In order to establish an actual ground for the telluric test platform radio equipment; the crew at EPD drove six ground rods spaced 10′ apart. These are all bonded, and terminate inside the lab to an aluminum bus on the back of the TCS workbench. The resistance between the water tank and this station ground measured about 3 to 5 ohms — acceptable.
The TCS Bench
The A.C power coming into the building is run through an isolation transformer in order to seperate our power supply from the high voltage neutral. Either leg of each outlet measures 60V with reference to ground, but compound with eachother to provide a standard 120V A.C connection. This floating ground arrangement is consistent with how the NAVY would typically wire their ships.
A 12-volt DC power supply with twist lock outlets runs the full bench length. We have a battery arrangement with associated charging appartus; along with a separate 12-volt DC power supply which can be run off of the above mentioned A.C system. A 24-volt D.C leg on our twist lock outlets is planned as well for other radio equipment, but is not actively implimented.
Gang Green Energy
In this demonstration, Eric puts the power company’s signal as picked up between their high voltage neutral, and our isolated ground on the oscilloscope. It looks more like a video signal than anything from a power frequency standpoint. It has a repetition rate at the power frequency, but there’s nothing about it that even remotely resembles a sine wave. Very unstable — it can be seen in previous demonstrations that this visual signal morphs and tranforms based on as of yet unkown conditions.
The waveform is more likely 180 cycles per second rather than 60 because of the three phases adding up in the neutral. The distortion is caused in part by rectifiers converting AC to DC. There is not a proper inductance on the line in order to prevent transients from appearing; nor is there implimented synchronous condensors to keep everything in phase based on the inertia of mechanical apparatus. Switching power supplies produce further glitches and RF on the line. This is what happens when you use a Y-connected power system and start hooking inappropriate equipment to the power line.
This is what plays havoc with all audio and radio equipment and permeates the entire electrical system. That’s why so much effort went into the isolated ground system.
Eric points out that every recording studio and radio station he built was wired this same way. Normally if you took the active lead on a phone plug in a guitar amplifier and touched your finger to the tip, you’d blow your speakers out. In the studios he built, all you’d hear would be the buzzing of the gang green energy off in the distance — no damage, no overpowering of the speakers.
Once the TCS system is fully lit up and everything’s hot with RF, restrictions get even tighter on keeping it all stable. This is an ongoing effort; the work of EPD Laboratories is presently reliant on the donations from people like yourself. If you are interested in seeing the continuation of our efforts; please contribute to our work!
ESTC 2026 – Meet Eric in Person
Eric Dollard will be presenting at the 13th Annual Energy Science & Technology Conference — June 24-28, 2026 in Spokane, Washington. All 55 in-person seats are sold out. Live streaming tickets are still available.
Here’s a new video from a recent live call featuring Eric Dollard, Adrian Marsh PhD, Hakasays, and several callers asking questions. We covered a lot of ground in this discussion – from the live earth signal reception system now streaming at epdlabs.org to the novel audio amplifier project, the legendary “Glom Locker” full of vintage surplus parts, and some fascinating observations about what’s happening with solar activity and earth signals.
Earth Signal Reception – Now Live
One of the main topics Eric covered was the seismic streaming system that’s now live. This is the culmination of over $300,000 and 10 years of infrastructure development at the EPD Laboratories facility in Nevada.
The system uses a 4,800 ft antenna section (about 5/6 of a mile) running from pole 26 to pole 49, with transmission lines going to a shack at pole 54. That’s over a mile of wire total, with two conductors – so basically double that length when you add it all up.
What you’re hearing when you tune in are the electrical signals between the ionosphere and the interior of the earth (about 5 miles underneath your feet, as Eric explains). The pops and clicks are lightning strikes. But the really interesting part is when those strikes start to make pitches – chirps and squeaks at very high frequencies that are responses to the lightning creating standing wave situations in the earth.
Eric explained that when things start getting stressed inside the earth, those pitches drop down in frequency and sound more like “breaking beer bottles” and chirping noises. You also get frequency sweeps which are waves propagating through the magnetic field of the earth. The more coherent and musical the sounds become, the more likelihood there may be seismic activity brewing – though as Eric notes, it’s more complicated than that simple correlation.
The system intercepts the electrostatic displacement current between the ionosphere and the interior of the earth through a mutual capacitance configuration. It’s a remarkable setup.
Note: you may need to set “original sound for musicians” in your audio settings because the pops and clicks can get filtered out otherwise as “interference.”
The “Glom Locker”
We also showed some footage of the famous Glom Locker – an intermodal shipping container filled with thousands of rare vacuum tubes, cases of capacitors, and all kinds of vintage surplus parts. Much of this was acquired by Steve Hills (the director of EPD Laboratories Inc) over decades in the surplus business, along with contributions from Mark McKay.
My friend Jari Karvonen spent about a week helping organize some of this during a recent trip, but we really only scratched the surface. The importance of this collection cannot be overstated – as Eric pointed out, modern components simply don’t work like the old stuff. Brand new electrolytic capacitors from top name brands had so much effective series resistance they weren’t even functioning as capacitors. The new stuff just doesn’t cut it.
When you’re building one-of-a-kind equipment like the Navy TBM transmitter setup or the earth signal amplifiers, you have to glean eBay for the last of the real components from the 50s and earlier. It’s actually cheaper in the long run, and you know it’s going to work.
The Novel Audio Amplifier Project
Eric has been developing a completely novel audio amplifier design that’s unlike anything else in the audio world. This isn’t a voltage gain amplifier like virtually everything else on the market (including all solid state amplifiers). Instead, the transformers themselves amplify – the tubes just add power.
The design extends the original Macintosh concept of equal loading in the cathode and anode with bifilar winding, taking it to multi-stage transformer configurations that are also multi-stage amplifiers. The transformers are coupled with the vacuum tubes into something like a traveling wave amplifier.
The development path goes from small triodes to 6AS7G tubes (which have high transconductance but people use them as voltage amplifiers and get nowhere), then to the Western Electric 300 type triode, and finally to the 811 and 812 power triodes for a 300 watt per channel final version.
The commercial version will be based on a Western Electric 143A theater amplifier design – we found one on eBay from Japan for $27,000, which gives you an idea of what the authentic units go for. This design uses currently available tubes like the 6SN7 and 6550.
The key innovation is focusing on eliminating intermodulation distortion rather than just harmonic distortion. As Eric explained, it’s intermodulation distortion that creates phantom signals – beat frequencies between higher frequencies that don’t actually have any real existence. That’s especially critical when amplifying earth signals where you don’t want artifacts.
Custom transformers and chokes are currently being engineered by a well-known company to go on the prototype panels I cut while I was down there. Once we have a working proof of concept, the goal is to produce a limited edition of maybe 10 rack-mount units to raise funds, then potentially set up an audio company to bring a commercial version to market.
And here’s the kicker – there won’t be a single component made in China in the whole thing. All vintage quality parts sourced from eBay.
Observations on Solar Activity and Earth Signals
One of the more sobering parts of the discussion was Eric’s observations about what’s happening with solar and earth electrical activity. Steve McGreevy and others who have monitored these signals for decades have reported that the earth just seems to be getting quieter and quieter. The solar cycles have been getting weaker and weaker, and quite possibly the next solar minimum will be the biggest dip we’ve seen since this stuff has been recorded.
Even when the earth got hit by a significant coronal mass ejection recently, nothing showed up on the antenna – normally around midnight it would go into “complete war” during such an event. So the whole sun/earth electrical system seems to be in some kind of declining phase. As Eric noted, this could be a sine wave 25,000 years in length – about one aeon. It’s happened before during things like the dark ages grand minimum.
This makes the work of capturing and recording these signals now even more important – so we have historical data for when activity eventually picks back up.
What’s Needed to Continue This Work
Eric was candid about the funding situation. About $50,000 has been used up getting to what you see here, and significant donations haven’t come in for quite a while. The next big expenses include:
Another NV Energy power connection at the mine: $15,000
Contractor to put up toll entrance cable on the right of way: $14,000
Labor costs for specialized workers to advance the projects
The donations are what keep the motor running – whether it’s big contributions like the $10,000 someone donated to buy the 5 miles of brand new copper wire, or smaller amounts that add up over time.
Every donation goes directly into furthering this work in the electrical sciences. For those who don’t have money to donate, sharing these videos and driving traffic to the websites helps us reach people who might be able to contribute.
ESTC 2026 – Meet Eric in Person
Speaking of Eric Dollard – the 13th Annual Energy Science & Technology Conference is happening June 24-28, 2026 here in Spokane, Washington. Eric is scheduled to present on “The Alexanderson Ariel & Bolinas Alexanderson Antenna” and “Gangrene Energy” (with live demo).
This is your chance to meet Eric in person, ask questions, and experience live demonstrations you won’t see anywhere else.
Only 19 in-person seats remain out of 55 total. And here’s the thing – this is the same weekend as Hoopfest (the world’s largest 3-on-3 basketball tournament), so hotels are already filling up.
Super Early Bird pricing of $347 (save $100) ends February 28th.
Other highlights include:
Adrian Marsh PhD presenting on “The coMra Effect” and “A Foundation for Esoteric Science”
Hakasays demonstrating “Tesla’s Extra Coils”
Justin Miller’s status report on the EPD Long Line Facility
Davy Oneness on gravity wave detectors and John Bedini’s B.A.S.E. processor
Carmen Miller presenting a 2-phase AC motor allegedly built by Tesla himself
23+ presentations total with 11+ live demonstrations
There is a lot more discussed on the live call but that is the focus – please support EPD Laboratories, Inc. 501(c)3 non profit with donations to help further this kind of work: https://ericpdollard.com/donate
This is a remote facility that we have experimented on it the past. We would like to conduct further experiments on that structure but in the interest of cost we have decided to focus on the facilities in close proximity to the Lab at this time.
Early last month, 4 of us from Spokane and several other team players from California converged at EPD Laboratories, Inc. to get some projects completed. We succeeded and it couldn’t have happened without your donations!
Here is a slideshow that will explain quite a bit and in the next newsletter(s), we’ll show you the videos of the telluric test and the rotary electrostatic capacitor test that proves that John G. Trump was telling the truth about his masterpiece.
Please donate to EPD Laboratories, Inc., 501(c)3 – all donations are tax deductible and they get put to good use! Donation instructions are in the right column of https://ericpdollard.com – just scroll down for info on donations by mail or PayPal – thank you!
