Date: Tue, 22 Dec 92 16:42:46 EST
From: jas@proteon.com (John A. Shriver)
Subject: FAQ's?: balanced, ferrofluid, tube manuals

The most readily available tube manual is the General Electric one.
(Title is "Essential Characteristics.")  I don't know if it's actually
still in print, but there is plenty of inventory.  It can be bought
for US$7.95 from Antique Electronic Supply of Tempe, Arizona.

The GE manual does not have a lot of depth on each tube.  However, it
has the most important characteristics, pinouts, and covers more
different tubes than any other manual I know of.  An excellent deal.

There are also quite a few data sheets on key audio tubes in the VTL
Handbook, from Vacuum Tube Logic.  (Also available from AES.)

The other popular tube manuals are the RCA ones.  All are out of
print, and are rapidly becoming collectors items.  They may sometimes
be found at Ham Radio Flea Markets and Antique Radio Shows.  The first
was RC-1 sometime in the thirties, the last was RC-30 in the
seventies.  They also published the HB-3 loose-leaf notebook series,
but it these are much rarer, and rarely are found in versions that
reach up to the more recent tubes.  (People let their subscriptions
lapse.  My most recent one only reaches to 1957.)  The HB-3 is quite
detailed.

Other vendors had their own manuals.  Often the best data for a tube
is in the manual of the company that originally designed that tube.
This is especially true of power tubes.  (This is a virtue of the
reprints in the VTL book.)

For instance, I'm still trying to find an Amperex manual to get all
the data on the strange Amperex tubes that Tektronix used in their
last vacuum-tube oscilliscopes in the sixties.  They are not covered
in any depth in my GE manual.  (There is a lot to be learned from Tek
scope designs.)