CRT Retromod - feasibility analysis

[DougM]

This isn't ostensibly computer related, but I figure if there's a group of people anywhere who know a lot about CRT's it' likely you folks.

The other day I was in the crawl space and I've had this thing in there for probably 20 years.


In my blissful ignorance I think it's a WWII radar head unit but honestly I have no idea. It weighs a lot.

My question is, what is the feasibility of extracting only the tube and, using modern electronics, getting it up and running? I saw on Hackaday a CRT Driver and I'm wondering if it's compatible..

The Open Hardware Driver For CRTs

CRTs are the king of displays for any homebrew project. They have everything – high voltages, high vacuums, X-rays, and the potential for a vector display – that makes a project exude c…

hackaday.com

Electrostatic CRT Driver Design

Update 23-December-2014: Richard at LabGuy’s World has wiring diagrams for the RCA 913 and the 3JP7, and other neat stuff. Update 23-June-2014: Please see the CRT Board BOM Updates page for i…

tubetime.us

Initial thoughts?

Thank you,

 

[Chuck(G)]

Given the probably vintage of the thing, deflection is probably electrostatic, not magnetic. How do you feel about rolling out high-voltage circuitry? Recall that these things were vacuum tube interfaced.

 

[DougM]

I'm ok with high voltage as long as I'm not designing or building the circuit. Something off the shelf is what I'm after. But if that's not possible with electrostatic then I'll not crack this thing open.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Almost all the off-the shelf stuff is manufactured for the conventional magnetic deflection. As far as I'm aware, ES deflection was last used on analog oscilloscopes.

 

[DougM]

sounds like a dead end. Thanks @Chuck(G) for your input.

 

[durgadas311]

Get a ouija board, contact my dad, and he'll tell ya how to use it. After he tells ya how he had a snowball fight on Kauai in 1942.

 

[Bob-O-Rama]

My non-responsive answer is "Don't hurt that thing!" The illegible tag upper left will tell you what is it. IMO, get a crappy mass production oscilloscope and leave the WWII relic for someone else. LOL. Also radar CRTs are really a different animal, not only from a deflection standpoint, but the phosphors are usually weird with a long extinction coefficient components that is charged up by increased brightness of the trace to make a persistent image in different colors. If, OTOH, this thing is an oscilloscope and you can hijack the low voltage inputs for deflection, it may be usable for your purpose. Assuming you can get it working. I have a couple radar CRT tubes I am keeping for a day when I can drive them properly, one is 14" in diameter. Its huge.

 

[DougM]

Don't hurt that thing!

My fear is that it probably has about $300 worth of copper in it and anyone who takes it would probably scrap it. It's too heavy to pack for shipment from my house, so that limits me to figuring out whom to give it to in the Seattle area.

Retirement is looming, and while I have a lot of projects on the docket it never hurts to have one that expands my horizons in a direction like this. That said I can't think of what I would actually do with the tube once I achieved the capability of driving it. A clock seems pretty uninspired. I guess setting up IR motion sensors all around the yard and having a top down "radar" display showing movement would be fun.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Brush the dust off the nameplate and read it. Most mil-spec gear is pretty well identified.

 

[tradde]

You could try Adrian Black of Adrian's Digital Basement. But he's in Portland I believe. Not sure he'd want it, but he has done some non PC type repairs. Just a thought.

 

[durgadas311]

I'm not sure if that is WWII or early cold war, but the early radar systems were pretty simple. They only displayed a single horizontal trace on which one could measure distance to contact and some rough idea of the type of contact (scattering and strength of return signal). So this CRT may not be what you're thinking, it may not be able to display any sort of fancy image (without a lot of modification). I would say that it is a "valuable" (by some definition) piece of history and it would be interesting (to me at least) to see if there were a way to hook up modern "radar" equipment such that you could use it to identify and track the raccoons that cross your back yard at night... or the progress of the UPS guy on your street.

I'd really like to see a good picture of the dials/controls, to see if I could relate to anything I remember of my dad's stories of manning the radar in WWII.