Collaborate Disseminate
It was with considerable interest last month that I set out to track down where in the world there are still factories making tubes. My research found them in Slovakia, Russia, and China, and it’s fairly certain I didn’t find all the manufacturers by any means. There appeared to be …read more
Continue reading That Elusive Valve Amp Sound, For Not A Lot! (There Has To Be A Catch)
If you’re a frequent traveler on a public transit system, it can be helpful to know when the trains or buses are arriving and if there are any delays. We might reach for a tablet to mount on the wall, but that relies on keeping the OS, the software, and …read more
Continue reading Live Map of London Tube Created In PCB and Lights
We see quite a bit of work where people decapsulate ICs or other solid state devices to expose their inner workings. But how about hollow state? [Tomtektest] had a dual triode that has lost its vacuum integrity — gone to air, as he calls it — and decided to open …read more
Regular readers will know that here at Hackaday we have a penchant for poking fun at the more silly end of the audiophile world, with its dubious accessories and purple prose. It’s worth remembering though that this is not representative of the whole discipline of audio design, indeed the quest …read more
When tubes were king, you could go to a drugstore with a box full of them from your TV. There would be a tester that would tell you what tubes were bad and, of course, you could buy the replacements for them. That kind of tube tester was pretty simple. …read more
If you’ve ever worked with vacuum tubes, you’ll probably have a healthy appreciation for high voltage power supplies. These components require higher potentials to get those electrons moving, or so we’re told. It’s not the whole truth though, as [Albert van Dalen] demonstrates with his tube preamplifier running …read more
Even if you don’t work in a nuclear power plant, you might still want to use a Geiger counter simply out of curiosity. It turns out that there are a lot of things around which emit ionizing radiation naturally, for example granite, the sun, or bananas. If you’ve ever wondered …read more
Continue reading You Didn’t See Graphite Around This Geiger Counter
Old military equipment can sometimes be found in places like flea markets and eBay for pennies, often because people don’t always know what they have. While [tsbrownie] knew exactly what he was getting when he ordered this mystery device, we’re not sure we could say the same thing if we …read more
Next year we’re arguably coming up on the centennial of electronic music, depending on whether you count the invention or the patent for the theremin its creation. Either way, this observation is early, so start arguing about it now. If you want to celebrate the century of the theremin, how …read more
Continue reading A Tube Theremin, Just Like Grandpa Leon Used To Make
When you think of a software defined radio (SDR) setup, maybe you imagine an IC or two, maybe feeding a computer. You probably don’t think of a vacuum tube. [Mirko Pavleski] built a one-tube shortwave SDR using some instructions from [Burkhard Kainka] which are in German, but Google Translate is …read more