• WARNING: Tube/Valve amplifiers use potentially LETHAL HIGH VOLTAGES.
    Building, troubleshooting and testing of these amplifiers should only be
    performed by someone who is thoroughly familiar with
    the safety precautions around high voltages.

What are some of the wackiest tubes?

Back in the 90's (best guess) there was a construction article in one of the ham radio magazines about a microwave transmitter that used a magnetron from an oven. There was a sweep tube in series with the magnetron to modulate the current through the tube. This resulted in a "dirty" transmitter that made both FM and AM at the same time. I built one and it did work. Ovens operate in the 2.45 GHz ISM band which is also authorized for ham radio use in the USA and other countries. Note the ham band is actually 2.39 to 2.45 GHz. It is posible to operate the magnetron inside a phase locked loop such that it can be set to a constant frequency and modulated with audio. The phase noise performance of such a "VCO" was real bad so narrow band FM was impossible, but the 200 KHz channels used by commercial FM radio made the receiver design easy. Just pipe the output of your downconvertor into an FM tuner. I used the Technics tuner from my stereo.

The sweep tube modulated oven tube was a very temperamental and unstable beast. It would lose lock or emit spurious bursts of wideband noise whenever it felt like it, or even if the antenna was moved. It also required about 3000 volts to operate. It didn't take long to discover that hacking the tuning on a decommissioned point to point transmitters was far easier and safer, but not as powerful.
 

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