All RF Cafe quizzes would make perfect fodder for employment interviews for technicians or engineers
- particularly those who are fresh out of school or are relatively new to the work world. Come to
think of it, they would make equally excellent study material for the same persons who are going to
be interviewed for a job.
Some of these books used in quizzes are available as prizes
in the monthly RF Cafe Giveaway.
Note: Many answers contain passages quoted in whole or in part from the text.
quiz is based on the information presented in
Your Own Tube Testers and Electron Tube Equipment, by Gary Steinbaugh.
With more than 30 years of RF engineering experience and Ham radio involvement,
Gary has a very broad and deep proficiency in electronics. His new book,
Your Own Tube Testers and Electron Tube Equipment, is a great assimilation of his personal knowledge and
includes some of the highest quality line drawings and photographs of any technical book I have ever seen - and
I've seen a lot of them! The preface section is also unique in nature, followed by a short history of and basic
circuit design principles for vacuum tubes. Gary also conceived of and built a 3-dimensional physical model of the
plate, transfer, and constant current characteristic curves for a typical vacuum tube (6SN7); you've never seen
this before. The homebrew tube tester and power supply projects described in the text and built by Gary are exceptional
examples of craftsmanship.
1. Which of the following are negative properties of
a) Heavy and bulky
b) Electrically fragile (intolerant of overloads and spikes)
c) Low power efficiency
d) Capacitance varies with applied voltage
Which of the following are negative properties of transistors?
a) Mechanically fragile (impact and
b) High output impedance requiring matching transformers
c) Low impedance requiring
high-value capacitors for coupling
d) Tend toward high distortion
Who received the first U.S. patent for an electronic device?
a) Nikola Tesla
b) Lee de Forest
c) Thomas Edison
d) George Westinghouse
4. What is a "bogey"
a) A normal, or "typical," tube statistically centered in the distribution
b) A bad tube
c) A tube that measured one above par
d) A tube used for
5. What is the most common type of gradual failure
in a vacuum tube?
a) Glass envelope breakage
b) Filament breakage
c) Pin bending
d) Low cathode emission (aka cathode depletion)
6. What are the two basic types of serviceman's vacuum tube testers?
a) High voltage and low voltage
b) Cathode emission measurement only, and both cathode emission
and amplification measurements
c) Standard tube size and peanut tube size
d) Hand carried and backpack
7. What is a typical vacuum tube filament temperature?
a) 400° C (752° F)
b) 800° C (1,472° F)
c) 1,200° C (2,192° F)
d) 1,600° C (2,912° F)
8. What is a sesquimultiplier?
a) A sesquine duplicator
b) An ancient form of the abacus
c) A vacuum tube circuit that
performs numerical multiplication
d) A circuit that multiplies voltage by 1.5
9. Why are "operational amplifiers" (aka "opamps") named thus?
a) They were originally part
of circuits for performing mathematical operations
b) They were developed for use in medical equipment
c) They were first used in audio equipment for opera houses
d) They were named after the Greek philosopher
10. What is the word used to the measure of how
significant the space charge effect is on the beam's motion ?
Need some help? Click here for the
answers and explanations.
Posted January 1, 2014