Already done Bill, but it's not that cheap. Conversions of Hickok's
cardmatic are available and a computer drives that setup section of the
tester. All the tubes are in the system. I don't remember who is doing
that, but you need to supply the tester. Oh and the $1600 bucks.
"William Noble" wrote in message
...

"Jim Adney" wrote in message
...
I recently got out my trusty Heathkit TT-1 tube tester to check a
bunch of tubes that had accumulated here. I've stopped using its roll
chart, because it's starting to show its age, and I assume the roll
chart is not replacable. If it IS, I'd love to hear about it.




this does bring up an interesting thought, not totally unrelated -
with today's inexpensive computer interfaces, why not build/market a
tube tester accessory that would plug into a USB bus - all you would
need is one of each kind of socket on the unit, and a couple of power
sources (filament and plate/bias voltages) - so a set of SCRs to
choose filament voltage and apply it to the proper pins, 4 or four
cheap D/As to create the voltages (maybe with an HV op amp to create
higher voltages), and op amps and A/D with a mux to scan voltages and
currents on all the pins of every socket - this would probably take no
more than 50 to 100 parts and a small PC board and you could have the
tube info read from a computer database and have the test results
displayed graphically - transconductance plots, leakage, emissivity,
all those esoteric parameters.

Done as a labor of love, where the NRE is not amortized, it could be
profitable at the $150 to $300 price range - wouldn't this be a good
thing? it would take less space, be more accurate, faster and less
error prone than using a 40 to 60 year old largely mechanical device.


so, who's gonna make it?

** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **