Whats your favorite tube type?

[CPUShack]

Triggers?
Nixies?
Neon?

What do you like?

(Myself I just find them and give them to JAC lol)

[wepwawet]

beer bottle size DeForest Audion:-)

[JAC]

Right now I am feeling the love from 1950's vacuum tubes and nuvistors. I must get some of the cool stuff I have picked up online.

It blows my mind that I can read a book from 1955 on computing, then look on the web and find a store selling the key tubes at a reasonable price brand new and never used. It's common to find tubes packed in the late 50's and early 60's that have never been opened since the day they were packed. Just think of all the stuff that has gone on in your life - and that tube has just been sat on the shelf waiting for you to come purchase it- ok.. enough with the philosophical musing.

Stuff I am doing at the moment is experimenting with various tube circuits to get the hang of this old stuff - actually, I dont think of it as old anymore, I just think of it as the way things work. A bunch of stuff I studied in my degree course makes more sense now.

Also looking at counting circuits and all the various approaches they tried. When I get the time I am going to make a nixie clock using just ring counters or decade scalers - no, its not complex and its actually very simple - but it looks cool.[/i]

[pcoderDude2015]

Cathode-Ray-Tube : It is FUN to watch them GLOW

I still have a few, too, btw...and, they are "WORKING"

Now,...does anyone have a "ion-drive" car yet? LoL

Bye for now...

Jt

[Vlasta]

Traveling Wave Tube - I used to work in a microwave relay station. When I think of how many I smashed up when scrapping some old 4Ghz systems it breaks my heart. The tubes were about 2 feet long and make great desk ornaments.

[rjluna2]

My fave is Mercury Vapor Rectifier. I have a couple in my collection

[Vlasta]

[Calg5]

I have a Phillips XX1080 night vision tube. New, unused. Technology that is still used today.

[berni]

definitely CRT's, these are artworks of glass!

The deflection system of the really fast CRTs (>1Ghz bandwidth) are designed as TWTs and for increasing the brightness a electron multiplying part like in night vision devices is used...

[fritsp2007]

This my favorite

[rjluna2]

[Vlasta]

I thought you meant one of these... giant ones. I used to work with someone who saw one of these suckers fired up. He said they produced a lot of UV too - no idea if true. These big ones are truly massive. He told me the one he saw had a room to itself!

[rjluna2]

[fritsp2007]

Whooo...That's good looking.

[gekaufman]

Mercury vapor rectifiers are cool looking, but a pain to use. They need to be pre-heated or they flash over (sometimes dramatically). If they are moved around they need to be pre-conditioned by heating the filament without B+ for an extended period of time. They also give off tons of RF hash.

I know, I built a 211 single ended triode amp with 866jr rectifiers a few years back.



Lots of great tubes, early triodes, transmitting tubes, nixies, pixies, decatrons, Wunderlich, Arcturus Blue etc.

Look at Mike Harrison's site if you like this sort of stuff:

http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/

Bill Condon's site also has some great early tubes:

http://www.bill01a.com/photos.htm

While my CPU collection is tiny, I do have probably 15K tubes