Dave Edwards wrote in message
...
Compare the price of 6146's and sweep tubes the time the T4X was on the
drawing board, and I bet you'll find your answer!
....Dave
"RadioGuy" wrote in message
...
The thought came to me the other day whle thinking about the cost of
6JB6's
nearly $100 for a set; I paid $18.00 for a matched set of three at AES
back
in the 1970's and I got plenty of spares. Why did Drake use those cheap
ass
sweep tubes in their final instead of the old standard 6146 to begin
with?

Sure, back then it seemed in vogue to use sweep tubes in amateur gear
(yea,
sure, Swan gear...) but as I recall, we thought that Drake was kinda
cheesy
to use those tubes anyway. I gonna stick my neck out and say Drake
engineering wasn't the end all that the youngsters think nowadays.

I don't recall the 6146 was that expensive. We could find them at the
hamfest, surplus and they were routinely given away from one ham to
another... heck, Heathkit used them, Collins used them... (not to mention
the ham and commercial gear in the 60's) and to think that Drake had to use
a sweep tubes in gear that many of us thought was somewhat superior to
Collins. By the 1970's the 6146 was so plentiful that they really weren't
an issue. It was the sweep tube that turned many of us off---but then the
Drake name seemingly overshadowed whatever disappointment we had. Remember
how you hated to tune up from fear of destroying those things. Gee... I
remember those sweep tube CB amplifiers that fed the CB craze of the 70's.
What was it... 12 6DQ6's in parallel or something gosh...

RG