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Big Bad Bob Big Bad Bob is offline
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Default The most important tubes ever made.....

On 01/03/19 14:54, wrote:
I am glad this forum is still here and sort of active. I enjoy working
on tube equip for my hobby. If I had to work on solid state stuff, my
soldering iron would have been packed away in the attic years ago. I do
on occasion work on some early transistor stuff, but when I see ICs, the
device goes right out the door, untouched.


heh yeah, tubes made the electronics easier to deal with, that's for
sure. An IC with an OEM label on it is like a 'mystery black box' and
if you don't have an adequate schematic for the thing, damn near
impossible to troubleshoot. I've had to deal with desoldering and
replacing ICs and you can't do it to test-troubleshoot, especially CPUs
and logic arrays. Best method to deal with those is clip the leads,
desolder them, then re-solder a new device where the old one was and
hope that was it, unless you have some really detailed information on
how to confirm that it's bad (etc.).

Trying to desolder an IC such that you preserve it to re-solder back in
place is likely to damage the circuit board. That goes double with
surface mount.

Tubes are also fun in that they actually look like they're doing
something, especially beam power tubes with the blue glow.