The AM Forum

Would a  3B28 at 1.5kV emit any x-rays?  (Or an 866 for that matter)


Rich

not enough to ever worry about. You've had xrays? probably 10,000X the amount.  I got a targeted dose to my tumor that was a million times over a xray dosage in a small area once a day for months.

radiation is yer buddy when used correctly. Dont be worryin bout hat ort of thing. It will give you apoplexy of the mind and paralyze you with self doubt.  :D

unmeasurable using present Xray instrumentation, at 1.5 kV. When you get above 5 kV they start to show their heads, but in harmless quantities. When >15 kV watch out. Like a rattlesnake. But the big doses come above 30 kV. It turns ceramic tan on tubes, and at 80 kV glass looks like the color of coffee after a few years service.

Hows about those days where you could go to a shoe store and see an X-ray of your feet??????
oooooops I have dated myself.............ha

fred.

My mother was one of the few married women working in a TB hospital ....  They took pictures of her hand to see if the equipment was working OK. Gold wedding band is radiopaque.    How times has changed...............  klc

Remember in the early days of color TV that the HV had to be adjusted properly to prevent or reduce x-ray emission to certain level and they warned not to sit to close to the set for fear of over exposure.

I remember those.  What about the fluoroscopes where you stood between the x-ray tube and the screen, the doctor turned it on, had you breathe in and out, and you stood there for 20 seconds or so, while enough x-radiation was passing through you to light up the screen like a CRT as your chest was being examined.  Imagine how much radiation the patient was getting.  But even more, the doctor, who did this every day over a period of years.

I once picked up an old fluoroscope from a dump pile and got it running.  I fired it up a few times, always shining the beam away from me, and viewing the screen through a mirror.  I thought I was being safe, until I borrowed a geiger counter and happened to have it turned on at the other side of the room, and as soon as I fired up that machine, the counter sounded just like a  bad case of a.c. power line noise.  It was radiating a lesser amount in every direction, even though the main beam passed through the little window in the unit.  I turned the thing off immediately and never fired it up again, and used the autotransformer as a plate voltage control for my first kilowatt transmitter.

To-day's fluoroscopes radiate only a minuscule amount of radiation into something like a sensitive TV camera tube, where the signal is amplified and displayed on a computer screen, but even so, the x-ray technician moves out of the shielded room while the x-rays are on, and the doctor views the screen from a remote location.

I have wondered if my cataracts, which first were diagnosed at age 35, but not treated until they began to seriously impair my vision at about age 60, could have been related to my exposure to x-rays from that machine.

Anyway the answer is that until you get up past 10KV on your doomsday radio you will probably still be able to father children.
Keith
WA1HZK

YUP now I know why the technician hides in another room when I get my every 4 mos CT scan. There's radiation there too.

Fred

Seriously, you haven't anything to worry about with 1.5 kV tube. The Xrays, if any, would be so soft that they wouldn't have any penetrating power, if you could even measure them. We have ceramic tubes at work that get a brown ring around them, from 19 kV plate voltage, after a few months sometimes. That same ring, can be removed by annealing the tube, so I am told, in an oven. We haven't seen any change in the ceramic properties to indicate its a problem. When we hipot incoming tetrodes to 55 kV DC, however, we have steel and lead shielding, or distance, between our test console and the tube under test. They have 'field emission' or dark current, which can cause considerable Xrays and draw a few mA from the high pot tester.