A Tube Tester Laid Bare

There’s still a mystique around vacuum tubes long after they were rendered obsolete by solid state devices, and many continue to experiment with them. They can be bought new, but most of us s…

Roll Your Own Simple Tube Tester

You can easily get carried away when trying to test things. For example, if you want to know if your car is working, you could measure the timing of the ignition and put the car on a dynamometer. O…

Vintage Tube Tester Teardown

[Mr. Carlson] has an old-style 1940-era radio tube tester, the kind that used to inhabit grocery and drug stores. It is in amazing condition and he was kind enough to tear it down for us. The teste…

Testing A Tube Without A Tube Tester

[M Caldeira] needed to test a tube and didn’t have a spare to do the old swap test. He also didn’t have a tube tester handy. Drawing inspiration from a 2015 video, he managed to cobble …

Modern Tube Tester Uses Arduino

There was a time when people like us might own a tube tester and even if you didn’t, you probably knew which drug store had a tube testing machine you could use for free. We aren’t sure…

Your 1958 Punch Card Machine Tested Tubes

We think of punched cards as old-fashioned, but still squarely part of the computer age. Turns out, cards were in use way before they got conscripted by computers. Jacquard looms are one famous exa…

Restoring A Vintage Tube Tester To Its Former Glory

It can be difficult for modern eyes to make much sense of electronics from the 1960s or earlier. Between the point-to-point soldering, oddball components, and the familiar looking passives blown up…