On Thu, 10 Nov 2011, David Griffith wrote:

Is there such thing as a modern databook or catalog of
currently-produced vacuum tubes? I'm tinkering with the idea of making
a modern tube broadcast AM receiver that I can run all the time without
thinking "gee, I'm going to pay through the nose for more tubes when the
time comes".

Pick a popular tube and build around it.

Was it the Conar receiver that used only 6U8s? Something like that, which
of course has the advantage of not requiring a bunch of different tubes.

A double triode is bound to be easy to get still, they were so common. A
7360 was too exotic, it didn't appear in any consumer equipment (though
that sort of tube did appear in some tv sets, though I'm not sure enough
that decades later there'd be a lot of stock).

It's interesting to contrast tubes with semiconductors. With tubes, one
tried to minimize the number of active elements, since they used up so
much power (in the filament) and space. With transistors, and even more
so with ICs, each stage could have loads of active devices, it was a
different method of design, allowed because the transistors were small and
low power. So a dual triode for instance, might seem lacking, but what
could you build if you were willing to use multiple tubes per stage?

Michael VE2BVW