In article , Hagstar wrote:

It's 50 bucks- likely it's an emission tester. These are much more
useful than, say, a TV7 because you can own it now and not have to save
money for years. If a person would like to use a Hickok but never buys
one and has to guess as to tubes, how are they ahead of the game? I'm
absolutely certain many of you would say it's MUCH better that they
NEVER buy a tester their entire lives if they can't afford a high end
Hickok. Yeah, everything else is a toy, uh huh- and the TV7 doesn't even
give a direct reading IIRC but requires math each time !

Actually, some of the cheap Hickok units are real transconductance testers,
and some of them do show up for next to nothing now and then. They aren't
any TV7, but they sure beat out the drugstore testers.

Some of the emission testers are no better than drugstore testers, and they
have a tendency to indicate perfectly good tubes are bad, or vice-versa.
This can be extremely frustrating if you ask me. They'll find open filaments
and poor emission, but other problems (especially on beam power tubes) do
not show up on them.

When you're paying some of the bloody insane prices on power tubes thes
days, a good tube tester can pay for itself in short order in the tubes
you don't throw out even though they are fine, and in the tubes you don't
have to keep around for substition testing.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."