On 26 Apr 98 at 12:05, William Donzelli wrote:
EICO was
considered higher quality than Heath Kits audio gear and made
excellent test equipment for the home-tech market in the tube era. Many
old-tube enthusiasts still use them .
Yes, better than Heathkits, but these days even the high quality stuff is
cheap and available (HP, Tektronix, Boonton, General-Radio, etc.). Of
course, the one place where you will have to spend money on old test
equipment _is_ that of tube testers, mostly due to the audiophiles. If you
can get a good old Hickok for less than $150, you should jump on it.
Bill I'm shocked. Hope that list name was
chosen in derision of the throw-away
generation. : ^ ))
The name came about by all of the smartass hams at the hamfests that would
watch some of us lug 90 pound tube radios back to our cars ("hey, where
did you get the boatanchor!"), while they had whole Kenwood stations that
would fit in a fairly small box. Of course, they would really start
laughing when we would have to go back to get the 40 pound power supplies.
People who view me and my puters fixations as stange anyway have thrown the
doorstop thing at me many times. A more novel suggestion has been using my
my 8580 full tower case as a coffee table. I considered it. My 3 5meg 8'' TRS
HDDs would also make a good base for a futon . I have a Qume daisy wheel
printer PS that will dim the lights in the neighborhood. ; ^ 0
Anyway, I really wonder how good most (all?) tube
testers would be for
digital logic applications. All of the good testers I can think of do a
fine job on emmision, shorts, and gas, but the gm test generally is fairly
dumb - a steady 60 Hz (sometimes 1 kHz) fed into the grid, and look at the
output. That is exactly what logic circuits do not do.
Because of the inexactitude of tube output it would almost be necesary to
test each one in circuit and then tweak I would think.
The Tek tube curve tracer (model 577 or 565 - help! I
can not remember)
would be very good, but you would have to sell your Imsai and Altair to
pay for one.
It might be cheaper to buy a used Cray. :^))
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net
ciao larry
lwalker(a)interlog.com