My name is Greg, and I am an addict.......of nixie tubes It all started when I was in the 7th grade; most kids I knew were into sports or starting into drugs. I got my fix from Radio Shack P-BOX kits. The neon 'idiot light' project had 5 NE-2 bulbs bulbs and ran on 4 AA batteries. Well, that did it for me, and soon I was building blinking neon gizmos that ran on the 120V line (Meh, who needs a transformer....not me)
About 2 years later, my friend's father was selling off some surplus equipment he got from the TRW swap meet; I got a Microdot 412A FM SIgnal Generator, which had 6 nixie tubes for displaying the frequency, and a myriad of illuminated switches, knobs, and meters. This thing big (19" rack x 20" deep x 18" tall), heavy (almost 100 lbs), and chock-full of electronic and mechanical wonders. I *really* wish I had a photo; definitely the coolest looking equipment I ever saw. And I had one..... I used the frequency counter for a few years, which in itself was impressive because it measured over 550 Mhz with discrete transistor circuits when it was built in the mid 1960's. Then I junked it, though I kept the 6-tube+socket+cage in my junkbox for about 30 years, knowing someday I would make a clock with it. I had mostly forgotten about it till 2011, when I decided it was finally time to make my first nixie clock, and now it sits on my desk at work. The walls of my cubicle are decorated with PC boards I've done since then, all of them nixie-related. I have 7 nixie clocks running now, with a total of 61 tubes in use. I keep telling myself I wont build *another* clock, but I end up doing that anyways (1 wrapping-up design, 1 on the drawing board, and more inside my head....). There's definite;y something wrong going on inside my head; maybe it was caused by breathing-in too many toxic fumes from all the things we used to burn/blow-up when I was a kid. -- 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 neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/57a5599b-7f2b-4290-81c3-43ce9b6bcbe2%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
