• 2024
  • Dec
  • 11

Some miscellaneous NIXIE devices to a new home.

I have a giant pile of crap that needs to go - probably to Hamvention - but I’ve been giving it away as I find people who are interested. A co-worker had a fake NIXIE clock on his desk, so I asked if he wanted some real stuff. He said yes, and here it is:

The first is a Fairchild Volt/Ohm meter. It does DC and Ohms. That’s all. It’s intact but rough, and looks like it may have had a handle at one time. Yes, it’s THAT Fairchild.

meteroff.jpg

The tubes in this guy are nice and bright, surprising for as poor of condition it’s in. It seems to work, but could use a calibration:

metertest.jpg

A disagreement of 0.04VDC. Not bad!

The second piece is a Time Systems counter. This is most certainly a piece of space race equipment put together by a company that sprung up to support the frenzy of the time. It’s a counter/timer with three ranges of measurement.

counter1.jpg

The back has a bunch of card edges on it. Probably brings out all of the data from the timer, but in what format - who knows.

counter2.jpg

There’s very little information about this company, and too many businesses today named “Time Systems.” I have to assume they’re like all these little companies from the period - appeared and made some equipment, 10 years later when technology made things cheaper they just kind of faded away.

Let’s set the generator to 1kHz and see what this thing does:

generate.jpg

Seems to be what I’d expect with this sig gen. The switches need a good cleaning, as they need to be wiggled to get the clock to run.

counts1.jpg

Testing against my “known” device:

counts2.jpg

These are off to their new home. Stay tuned for more Junk from the Hamvention Pile, I mean “Projects from the Bottom Drawer!”