A good testing tube will not necessarily sound good. Here are a few things I found out: most of the people out there selling tubes that have been tested on their "calibrated" testers will not test the same on your tester, or anybody elses for that matter. I bought an older Hickock and went to work buying/testing/matching tubes. When I got started in tube equipment a few years ago and started buying different tubes, I,too, wanted a tube tester. I haven't pulled the trigger to buy a kit yet, but it is still on my list. Just love it! Photos below show original board under test, board using a cheap USB serial port adapter that doesn't provide galvanic isolation, and lastly a pin-header replacing the MAX232C TTL to RS232 converter with a cheap eBay JY-MCU V2 Bluetooth serial board (with attached 3.3V-5V level shifter) for full galvanic isolation and working just fine. That's not to say the V3 is not a fabulous bit of kit - I and many others use it extensively - many of the items being addressed directly in the V4 version have work-arounds available in the current V3 implementation. There is a V4 of the uTracer in the pipeline, but probably a year or more away - it'll feature a better heater supply, higher anode voltages and +ve grid voltages amongst many other changes. he discovered some significant variation in batches of switching FETs he had supplied, so he sent everyone who had bought a kit a set of new FETs free (including free postage - most are overseas as well) just in case they had a problem.
Importantly, he also provides top class customer support - e.g. Ronald Dekker is a full professor at TU/e (the technical university of Eindhoven in Holland) and also a senior research fellow at Philips - consequently, the research and quality of his work, which he fully documents on the uTracer site and his homepage at (an excellent site) is nothing other than first rate. There are two Windows interfaces for the uTracer - one official one from Ronald himself, and the other from a talented professional programmer who also happens to like valves - these are discussed on the Yahoo! uTracer forum. Therefore, I replaced the RS232 serial interface with a Bluetooth one for about USD 15 (generic boards available on eBay) - very simple and provides complete galvanic isolation. It comes with an RS232 serial interface - personally, I didn't like that as if there was a catastrophic error with the uTracer, it might take the connected laptop/PC South with it ! The uTracer is not a difficult build - through-hole components mainly - took a day to build the main board - the kit & documentation are excellent - only uses top quality components, e.g. I have had one of these for over a year (by the way, I'm Nick de Smith - mentioned in a post above as the re-writer of Daniel Schoo's Hickok 539B/C manual as I have one and needed it to work in Europe ).
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