Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

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I restore a lot of 50s era tube radio equipment. The tubes are suprisingly robust!

I'm surprised at how many times _resistors_ go bad, and of course we all know that capacitors fail. But more often than not, all the tubes in a typical 5 tube AM radio I find are working.

Radio Shacks¹ used to have a tube tester machine in them.² I was always impressed that there was such a finite universe of tubes that a single machine could test all of them.

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1. For the kids, this was a store that sold various electric gizmos including radios and circuit components, then later computer and televisions.

2. I think they may have also been present in hardware stores as well.

There was a tube tester in our town's main pharmacy.

So in principle you could pull the main tubes from (say) your TV and have at it.

I remember tube testers at grocery stores when I was a kid. I'd go with my dad to test tubes from our TV set, and buy replacements for burned out ones.

There's a HeathKit one up on Ebay now: 'Heathkit TC-3 Tube Tester'

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