Quote:
Why waste money on crappy Heath, EICO, RCA or other low end sig
gens when you can get top notch gear cheap?
Not to impugn the quality of old HP signal generators, but one of the remarks outsiders make about threads like this is, newcomers to the antique radio hobby are often being told that they need better test equipment than the engineers who originally designed the radios had! If one is simply interested in learning how radios work and fixing up a few five tube or six transistor AM/SW radios, those old Heathkit, Eico, or RCA signal generators are a very reasonable and economical type to get. They put the sons and daughters of a lot of radio repairmen through college.
The HP-608 series of signal generators use UHF pencil tubes which are still available but not all that common. The 606 uses more common tubes but it can go through a lot of them if it is pushed to output high signal levels. Both are complicated, high maintenance instruments which have demanding alignment procedures and circuits that can be difficult to troubleshoot. I think somebody just getting into the hobby would be better served by a simple, practical, low maintenance generator like an Eico 324 than they would be by an HP 606 that may need a lot more than just a few capacitors or a tube or two. They can always sell the Eico or whatever and get something more advanced later on if they want to go further.