nickds1

I must say, though my Hickok 539C is immaculate and beautifully re-boxed, I hardly ever use it. I use the uTracer instead - mostly for matching - but also to compare Russian tubes with GE/Mullard/Philips/RCA "equivalents" etc...

I have had one of these for over a year (by the way, I'm Nick de Smith - mentioned in a post above as the re-writer of Daniel Schoo's Hickok 539B/C manual as I have one and needed it to work in Europe ). The uTracer is not a difficult build - through-hole components mainly - took a day to build the main board - the kit & documentation are excellent - only uses top quality components, e.g. turned-pin sockets. It comes with an RS232 serial interface - personally, I didn't like that as if there was a catastrophic error with the uTracer, it might take the connected laptop/PC South with it ! Therefore, I replaced the RS232 serial interface with a Bluetooth one for about USD 15 (generic boards available on eBay) - very simple and provides complete galvanic isolation. There are two Windows interfaces for the uTracer - one official one from Ronald himself, and the other from a talented professional programmer who also happens to like valves - these are discussed on the Yahoo! uTracer forum. Ronald Dekker is a full professor at TU/e (the technical university of Eindhoven in Holland) and also a senior research fellow at Philips - consequently, the research and quality of his work, which he fully documents on the uTracer site and his homepage at http://www.dos4ever.com (an excellent site) is nothing other than first rate. Importantly, he also provides top class customer support - e.g. he discovered some significant variation in batches of switching FETs he had supplied, so he sent everyone who had bought a kit a set of new FETs free (including free postage - most are overseas as well) just in case they had a problem... There is a V4 of the uTracer in the pipeline, but probably a year or more away - it'll feature a better heater supply, higher anode voltages and +ve grid voltages amongst many other changes. That's not to say the V3 is not a fabulous bit of kit - I and many others use it extensively - many of the items being addressed directly in the V4 version have work-arounds available in the current V3 implementation. Just love it! Photos below show original board under test, board using a cheap USB serial port adapter that doesn't provide galvanic isolation, and lastly a pin-header replacing the MAX232C TTL to RS232 converter with a cheap eBay JY-MCU V2 Bluetooth serial board (with attached 3.3V-5V level shifter) for full galvanic isolation and working just fine ...