Miniaturized electronic tubes 3739

The story I heard was that some of that was a deliberate choice to reduce the plane's vulnerability to EMP. (Or maybe that was just a fortunate side effect.)

Vacuum tubes are amazingly robust. I had an ancient signal generator that used a pair of 30 triodes (4-pin base, used the filament directly). The box was originally meant to be run from batteries, and the plate voltage was quite low (22 1-2 volts?). I rigged a voltage divider off a home-brewed power supply to run it. One day something shorted and the power supply's full 450 volts was applied to the tubes. I looked inside and could actually see arcing between the elements. I shut it down, corrected the short, and it came right back up, completely unharmed.

(The box was mechanically robust too. I strapped it to the back of my motorbike and went over to a friend's place. The signal generator came loose and fell off the bike at 50 mph. Aside from a dent in one corner, it was undamaged.)

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