Vacuum Tubes

They're speaking my language over at Nuts And Volts there. I started with transistors as a younger pup, but then wanted to do more with larger and more powerful equipment, and there were plenty of tubes in trashed TVs and radios thrown away regularly in my neighborhood, and plans for tubed equipment and tube specs in magazines and books, so it was a tube builder's paradise for experimentation!

Times eventually went to transistors for hobbyists, and the early germanium transistors couldn't really do a lot of audio or RF power, so later hobbyists were getting the short end of the stick with Science Fair transistor transmitters compared to the Knight Kit of their ancestors. I think it hurt the hobby a bit, because 40 feet of range from a 2SB56 would get kids bored faster than Knight, that gave you the taste of trying to reach a friend's house down the street, so you worked at doing that, and got sucked into the hobby further.

I built a lot with tubes and still have a fondness for them, and repair tubed equipment once in a while, but haven't built a tube circuit for years. I can still look into a box with a few hundred common tubes in the open with no boxes and pick out what the tubes are with good accuracy, like, that's a 6C4, that's a 12AX7, here's a 50C5, 6DQ6 and more, probably because I got into it so early with taking apart radios that it's knowledge that's locked in my head.

Boomer