Looking forward to my first visit to the Hamvention, is anyone else going or setting up booth? Making my tube list for the flea market. Coming with my wife. I did notice that George of Tubelab is on the vendor list, it would be awesome to meet him! Or any other small businesses here going.
https://hamvention.org/
https://hamvention.org/
See this thread. The 2022 list starts in post #190
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...he-dayton-hamfest.165790/page-10#post-6990880
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...he-dayton-hamfest.165790/page-10#post-6990880
As noted in the other thread I will be there.
It's that time of year again. I will be in the same place as last year from Thursday (vendor only setup day) through Sunday.
Due to several circumstances beyond my control, after 18 years Tubelab Inc. will cease operations at the end of 2023. It is lab cleanup time. I will stuff my van with tubes, transformers, unfinished amps, parts, books, and other stuff that I will no longer need.
It's that time of year again. I will be in the same place as last year from Thursday (vendor only setup day) through Sunday.
Due to several circumstances beyond my control, after 18 years Tubelab Inc. will cease operations at the end of 2023. It is lab cleanup time. I will stuff my van with tubes, transformers, unfinished amps, parts, books, and other stuff that I will no longer need.
I will still be around on the forums, but all board sales will cease as of the end of 2023 or whenever supply runs out. I haven't ironed out any of the details yet but I'll probably put the Gerber files into public domain so anyone can make them or organize a group buy. There are also dozens or other PC boards that I have made, but never released. Not sure what to do with them yet either. The web site is paid up until August, and I will renew it for at least a year if funds are available.
George, retired not so old geezer...........Age is relative. I'm 70. I was the "old fart" when I worked in the cell phone group at Motorola. I didn't fit in too well with the Starbucks generation. I got into a research group for the last 12 years of my career where I became "middle aged."
George, retired not so old geezer...........Age is relative. I'm 70. I was the "old fart" when I worked in the cell phone group at Motorola. I didn't fit in too well with the Starbucks generation. I got into a research group for the last 12 years of my career where I became "middle aged."
Somehow I managed to hang in there in sales until age 78. The big deal for me was the IFR / Aeroflex Comm Tests Sets.
You probably had both 2945 & 3900s in the lab. We put 3900s into Motorola here. Much earlier at HP the local Motorola
facility looked like an HP showroom. At one point we were selling thousands of 7-segment LED digits into that place as well.
Also flogged Boonton digital & Noisecomm. A person could get a real engineering education just keeping up with all these products.
And even did 3 yrs in Civil Engineering / Survey with HP. A strange place for them to be. Packard thought so too so we were out!
But like many other companies of note things changed rapidly. Companies regularly changed name, product lines & people.
All part of the hitech arena.
I would definitely do it all again!
You probably had both 2945 & 3900s in the lab. We put 3900s into Motorola here. Much earlier at HP the local Motorola
facility looked like an HP showroom. At one point we were selling thousands of 7-segment LED digits into that place as well.
Also flogged Boonton digital & Noisecomm. A person could get a real engineering education just keeping up with all these products.
And even did 3 yrs in Civil Engineering / Survey with HP. A strange place for them to be. Packard thought so too so we were out!
But like many other companies of note things changed rapidly. Companies regularly changed name, product lines & people.
All part of the hitech arena.
I would definitely do it all again!
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I worked at 6 different Motorola facilities in my 41 years there. I don't ever remember seeing an IFR or Aeroflex comm analyzer used in radio production. I think the service depot had some Aeroflex stuff though. I started working on the HT-220 hand held radio in 1973. All of the comm analyzers were Cushman CE-3's. I went to work in the cal lab in 1975 just as the MX-300 series radios were launched. There was a big push to use Motorola branded comm analyzers in the factory then. At the time the Motorola stuff was rebranded Systron - Donner equipment. Those analyzers had problems, so the factory went with Cushman CE-5's for the MT-500 radio launch. When the MT-500's were replaced with the HT90/440 line the factory went with Cushman CE-31's. They were the best of the Cushman bunch that I ever dealt with. By this time the Motorola comm analyzers were made by General Dynamics and they worked pretty well too. The factories were transitioning to ATE systems by then so the old manual stuff was replaced with racks of HP gear. HP had a guy whose primary responsibility was the multiple Motorola facilities in south Florida. Let's just say that he made more money than anyone who actually worked in the Motorola facilities.
The paging facilities had lots of Boonton RF signal generators whose number I can't remember. They had a green face with red LED readouts and used a Mallory Inductuner as the main frequency control. Let's just say that I had to change a lot of Inductuners. Eventually the green Boontons were replaced by HP8656's and later HP8657's which were highly reliable.
I left the cal lab in 1985 for an engineering job.
Speaking of LED readouts, remember the MAN-7. The letters MAN stood for Monsanto Alpha Numeric. Yes, the people poisoning our food with Glyphosate (Roundup) made LED's back in the 70's.
The paging facilities had lots of Boonton RF signal generators whose number I can't remember. They had a green face with red LED readouts and used a Mallory Inductuner as the main frequency control. Let's just say that I had to change a lot of Inductuners. Eventually the green Boontons were replaced by HP8656's and later HP8657's which were highly reliable.
I left the cal lab in 1985 for an engineering job.
Speaking of LED readouts, remember the MAN-7. The letters MAN stood for Monsanto Alpha Numeric. Yes, the people poisoning our food with Glyphosate (Roundup) made LED's back in the 70's.
I hope so! Also another member was capturing some of the legacy web sites like electra-print, gary pimm, etc. on a common domain, cant remember the member name. But that is a way for Tubelab.com to live on into the future after you retire it, it's helped so many people get started in the hobby.
Web hosting does not need to be expensive. Siteground offers hosting for $1.99/month. Their service and customer support is rock solid. Domain registration costs $10-20/year, typically. So we're talking $50/year to keep the site going. That could be collected with a donation button on each page. Only drawback: Someone would need to collect the money and pay the web host and domain registrar.
I'm happy to help getting the site moved over to a lower cost host if needed. I'm not able to be the admin, though.
Tom
I'm happy to help getting the site moved over to a lower cost host if needed. I'm not able to be the admin, though.
Tom
I'm still in the process of ripping apart, moving and reassembling everything in my basement lab for some serious radon mitigation work. After building the lab that I always wanted in the 2000 square foot basement of the retirement home we had built 9 years ago, I found radon levels over 10 X higher that recommended. This is a serious lung cancer risk that must be rectified. This means moving everything that sits on the floor, 9 benches or tables, and all the carpeting that's under them to seal all the cracks that have formed in the floor some of which are quite large. The radon mitigation company installed the "under the slab evacuation pump" but quoted over $1000 to seal the concrete, and that was with me moving all the stuff in the basement. I chose to do the sealing work myself.
I'm also starting to collect the stuff that I will bring to the hamfest in one place. I realize that I have collected far more stuff than I will ever use in the rest of my life, so some things need to go, or be minimized in size.
As many people here know I built all sorts of stuff as a kid with vacuum tubes because the tubes and other parts needed to make an amplifier were readily available in the trash. I got a job at Motorola in 1973 and they gave us free semiconductors (within reason) just by filling out a sample request form, so I made mostly solid state amps. I transitioned back to tubes when I traded my very first car, a drivable 1949 Plymouth for a Scott 272 amplifier and matching tuner sometime in the early 90's. The Scott kicked the Carver and Phase Linear stuff right out of the stereo rack and I began building tube HiFi amps again. I built a few one off tube HiFi amps and sold every one long before Tubelab was even a dream. One of the last pre-Tubelab amps I built was a push pull creation I called the 300Beast. It was ugly but sounded awesome. It used all junk box parts that somehow just clicked together. Any attempt to upgrade it with better parts made it sound worse. I tried some pricey UTC OPT's in place of the guitar amp stuff that was in the Beast, but NO, the Beast liked the ugly OPT's.
I listened to the Beast for a few years until I got the SE fever and started building SET's that led to the creation of Tubelab. I kept the Beast in a box on a shelf for almost 20 years thinking that I would use it again, or maybe rebuild it in a nicer package, but last night I decided that I would never get to it, and nobody else would likely want it either, so the Beast met its end. May it rest in pieces. I actually have a use for some of its transformers.
Shortly after designing the original TSE (see picture) I took the second of two home cooked prototype boards and used it for the driver in an 845 / 211 SE amp that made about 30 WPC on 1050 volts of B+. I used that amp for some time, but it put over 500 watts of heat into the room. That would not be a big deal here, but I had a 100 square foot room in Florida, so I couldn't be in the room with that thing for more than an hour or so. It eventually got sidelined and never got used again. It is a large heavy amp on two chassis. It has not seen power since about 2010 but was working when decommissioned. I stole a choke out of the power supply, but it is otherwise intact. It is another large heavy object that takes up space and will not get used in my lifetime. I also have several 211's and 845's that will not get used. If there's any interest, let me know and I will bring this stuff to the hamfest. If not, the tubes and OPT's get listed on the swap shop after the hamfest and the amp gets dismantled.
Note that the choke (black cube on left side) seen in the 300Beast is the same choke that is in the 845SE. It is now sitting on the shelf because the third amp I put it in didn't live long.
I'm also starting to collect the stuff that I will bring to the hamfest in one place. I realize that I have collected far more stuff than I will ever use in the rest of my life, so some things need to go, or be minimized in size.
As many people here know I built all sorts of stuff as a kid with vacuum tubes because the tubes and other parts needed to make an amplifier were readily available in the trash. I got a job at Motorola in 1973 and they gave us free semiconductors (within reason) just by filling out a sample request form, so I made mostly solid state amps. I transitioned back to tubes when I traded my very first car, a drivable 1949 Plymouth for a Scott 272 amplifier and matching tuner sometime in the early 90's. The Scott kicked the Carver and Phase Linear stuff right out of the stereo rack and I began building tube HiFi amps again. I built a few one off tube HiFi amps and sold every one long before Tubelab was even a dream. One of the last pre-Tubelab amps I built was a push pull creation I called the 300Beast. It was ugly but sounded awesome. It used all junk box parts that somehow just clicked together. Any attempt to upgrade it with better parts made it sound worse. I tried some pricey UTC OPT's in place of the guitar amp stuff that was in the Beast, but NO, the Beast liked the ugly OPT's.
I listened to the Beast for a few years until I got the SE fever and started building SET's that led to the creation of Tubelab. I kept the Beast in a box on a shelf for almost 20 years thinking that I would use it again, or maybe rebuild it in a nicer package, but last night I decided that I would never get to it, and nobody else would likely want it either, so the Beast met its end. May it rest in pieces. I actually have a use for some of its transformers.
Shortly after designing the original TSE (see picture) I took the second of two home cooked prototype boards and used it for the driver in an 845 / 211 SE amp that made about 30 WPC on 1050 volts of B+. I used that amp for some time, but it put over 500 watts of heat into the room. That would not be a big deal here, but I had a 100 square foot room in Florida, so I couldn't be in the room with that thing for more than an hour or so. It eventually got sidelined and never got used again. It is a large heavy amp on two chassis. It has not seen power since about 2010 but was working when decommissioned. I stole a choke out of the power supply, but it is otherwise intact. It is another large heavy object that takes up space and will not get used in my lifetime. I also have several 211's and 845's that will not get used. If there's any interest, let me know and I will bring this stuff to the hamfest. If not, the tubes and OPT's get listed on the swap shop after the hamfest and the amp gets dismantled.
Note that the choke (black cube on left side) seen in the 300Beast is the same choke that is in the 845SE. It is now sitting on the shelf because the third amp I put it in didn't live long.
Attachments
It's that time of year again. The Dayton Hamfest attracts over 20,000 people most of whom have some interest in electronics. There is also the biggest electronics related swap meets that I have ever been to. I will be bringing my usual van load of excess stuff to the same flea market spaces that I have occupied for every show since the move to the Xenia Fairgrounds, space number 9323 and 9324.
If anyone who is planning to come and wants me to bring anything unique or some particular tube numbers, PM me or post it here. The usual tubes, boards and transformers are a given.
As most know by now, Tubelab Inc. did not cease to exist at the end of 2023 and board sales continue for now. I might even be working on something new.
https://hamvention.org/
If anyone who is planning to come and wants me to bring anything unique or some particular tube numbers, PM me or post it here. The usual tubes, boards and transformers are a given.
As most know by now, Tubelab Inc. did not cease to exist at the end of 2023 and board sales continue for now. I might even be working on something new.
https://hamvention.org/