| Well, Donnie, those settings in your tester cannot possibly meet all of the operating conditions found in every radio ever made. A tube tester should be used as a guide, showing you where possible trouble lies. If you are absolutely sure that there is no other trouble, and the tester shows a tube to be weak, and the trouble goes away after you have replaced the tube, then the tube was in deed at fault. The tester led you to this. If, on the other hand, you are simply throwing out tubes because they test poorly in your tester, regardless of how they perform in an actual radio, then you are wasting tubes. As I have said before, an extremely weak tube may work poorly or not at all in a power output or rectifier situation. The same tube may work just fine as a detector diode, even with it registering at the very bottom of the scale. The tester should show you where the weak and suspect tubes are. Substitution should give you your final answer (whether the new tube does better or not). I realize that I cannot change everyone's opinion to match my own, but you really cannot rely on a tube tester as your only decision maker, regardless of how well it is built. Thomas |
Bill 
Doug Criner 