Sylvania SN-1551B mystery triode ?

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Sylvania SN-1551B mystery triode ?

Postby EWBrown » Wed Aug 17, 2016 3:56 pm

Looking for any useful tube data / info on the somewhat elusive Sylvania SN-1551B
subminiature, low-voltage triode N-1551B, produced in the late 1960s, early 1970s,
for various Department of Defence contractors.
Appears to have four wire leads, so I presume that it is a DHT.
I've tried all the usual tube data sources, coming up empty =:o :'( (???) :/

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Re: Sylvania SN-1551B mystery triode ?

Postby TomMcNally » Wed Aug 17, 2016 7:21 pm

This link is the only one that I found with any info ... he thinks it's a "rf oscillator tube for a proximity fuse artillery shell"

http://www.myday.com.tw/a_myday/product_view.php?apiname=api_usa_ebay&itemcode=200400631923
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Re: Sylvania SN-1551B mystery triode ?

Postby EWBrown » Thu Aug 18, 2016 3:10 pm

I got several replies on another vacuum tube site, and the general consensus is that they may have been used in Variable Time (VT) AKA Proximity fuzes.

http://www.tubecollector.org/equipment/ ... y-fuse.htm

I was wondering if these SN1551Bs were possibly VT (Variable time) or proximity fuze oscillators.
During WWII, my Dad served in the US Navy and was part of the engineering team who developed and tested these VT fuses in Dahlgren, Virginia. At the time, they were among the most secret and guarded projects, along with the atomic bombs and magnetrons for microwave radar.

If you can find the book "The Deadly Fuze", it covers the whole story of these devices, and includes a complete list of participants at the end of the book, My Dadis listed among them.

These tubes did not have a long operating lifetime requirement, but they had to withstand extreme linear and rotational acceleration forces, measured in the thousand of Gs. Operating frequency range was in the 88-108 MHz spectrum, which is today's FM broadcast band.


Another opinion is that they may have been used in an ionization measuring system.
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