You got that backwards. Unused digits/segments in a nixie become "poisoned" by stuff given off from the active segments. Trying to light those middle vertical and diagonal segments in a tube from a well-used "Giant Nixie Clock" from the early 1970's now, might reveal that those segments don't light at all. They may also light dimly, partially, or unevenly. They might be shorted to the back substrate and possibly even each other via the substrate. Or they might work just fine; those are large tubes and any given point on one segment is on average much farther away from the nearest point on each other segment than typical cathodes of small conventional nixies. But I can't think of any reason why they would ever be brighter than the segments which have been in use.
On Saturday, August 27, 2016 at 1:38:28 PM UTC-7, rmp wrote: > > To the folks who are still running the "Giant Nixie Clock". From the early > 1970's: > I built one of these way back when. Unfortunately, it is long gone, but > as I recall it treated the tubes as 7-segment devices, and so the 2 middle > vertical and the 4 diagonal segments will NEVER have been lit. Am I > correct? It would be an interesting exercise to make a test jig that can > illuminate all the segments and see how much, if any, the unused segments > are brighter than the used segments. > Just food for thought. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/b8884dd3-c357-4a4e-ad2f-245d8d4976e6%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
