Ben, As usual, you are thinking way ahead of me.
As for neons fading, I was thinking of some little "hockey puck" white neon night lights I use on board as signals to show my inverter is "up". My favorite use for neons today is to hold in front of a radar antenna to see if the transmitter is working. My favorite when I was a kid was to make a relaxation oscillator in a cigar box for the door of my bedroom. (I must admit I got the idea from my mentor W1BB - Stew Perry - the Big Wheel ham operator in my hometown.) I would beg for a used 90 volt "B" battery at the local radio repair shop (yes Virginia, they actually *repaired* electronics in the old days). A-batteries were to light the filaments, the B-battery for plate voltage in tube type portable radios. The first transistor radio, the Regency, came out when I was a teenager. I asked my mom for one, (they were about $50), for Christmas but the engineers in her convinced her she should get me a Philco instead. The Philco had subminiature tubes in it. These tubes were created for "proximity fuses", tiny radars in anti-aircraft rounds fired from guns that would actually detect when they approached the target airplane and blow up just as the range started to decrease. The Philco eagerly ate expensive batteries and the Regency is a collectors item today. I would put a capacitor across the battery in series with a resistor with the neon bulb across the capacitor. The capacitor would gradually charge up at a speed determined by the resistor until it reached the ionization point of the neon bulb, which would turn on discharging the capacitor. This would repeat resulting in a flashing neon bulb. I would use a big neon bulb, the kind with normal household threaded base. It had a nice electrode arrangement and looked snazzy. I would paint the cigar box black with the bulb sticking out the front and a sign "Warning: RADAR Burglar Alarm" Norm S/V Bandersnatch > As to fading, they certainly do - but only when driven hard (at least to > the best of my knowledge), which doesn't apply here. I've seen 40+ year > old neon bulbs still working fine, once you've wiped the dust and the > grime off. :) > _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
