Well, a few questions actually.

1) Is the effectiveness of a humbucking type of arrangement compromised by placing the pickups further apart (e.g., my understanding is that positions 2 and 4 in a strat are basically a parallel wired humbucker with the coils seperated)? Is this essentially as hum-cancelling as a true "Humbucker" style pickup?

2) If so, are the hum-cancelling properties of this arrangement compromised by using different types of single coil pickups (e.g., a "hot" pickup in the bridge position, a default strat pickup in the middle position, and a Burns tri-sonic in the neck position)?

3) Do you even need to have the RWRP pickup near the strings? I have read that to cancel the hum, you just need the coil....the magnet is superfluous. This makes sense to me in that the magnet is there to allow metal strings that move through it's field to generate electrical current, whereas it is the wire wrapping that acts like an antenna to pick up 60 cycle that is there independent of any magnet. This makes me wonder if you could bury the 2nd coil in the electronics cavity of the guitar (rather than placing it under the strings) and still have a perfectly effective hum-cancelling arrangement - one that retained the sound of a true single coil since the 2nd coil was not generating any signal (just noise)?

Thanks