Interestingly this is also common in Germany among the merchant crowd.
GA avionics has managed to avoid a disaster by the skin of its teeth 
although I don’t hold out much hope for HBK whose latest KI256 emulation product is still using the good old ECC83. The KLN94 went out of production in 2011 because they could not get any more EF80s for the GPS receiver.
Is Mullard really a Russian brand now? That’s sacrilege!
Tell me again the qualifications to be a local news writer…
PS my wife had to explain “aus Schbanien” to me (I had no idea what It might mean) but FYI she was in once in the Bavarian fruit and vegetable business and found it immediately hilarious
The KLN94 went out of production in 2011 because they could not get any more EF80s for the GPS receiver.
Are you serious? Semiconductor RF frontends have been with us since the 1960s! That said, EF80s are still readily available.
Luckily I have plenty of Russian and other tubes for my valve hi-fi. I also still have quite a few 6C33C-B high current (1A) triodes in case anyone needs some for their MiG restoration project. (They are supposedly the perfect valve for output-transformerless amplifiers, though I never got round to doing anything with them – mine uses 6AS7Gs – though still Russian).
It was a joke
The KLN94, like the HBK stuff from the same era, uses a GPS module they bought in from somewhere. It was 1Hz and precluded (well, so they said) various things like driving a roll steering converter (DAC-something for example) which “need” 5Hz (I think that’s BS; they are just lazy). Reportedly the KLN94 was dropped because the TFT LCD was no longer available. Always a weak link…
Russian tubes area real joke now, due to the embargo. The WIFI business is in panic mode. It was all fake of course like gold plated mains plugs, valve amps are a crazy idea. I’ve been building WIFI stuff since the 1970s.
valve amps are a crazy idea
Seriously off topic but – I disagree. When I bought my flat in London in 1997 I needed music for it. I listened to various things and thought just for the sake of it I should listen to some valve stuff too. At the level I was interested in (£1-2K) valve stuff deffo sounded better, and OTL especially so. It’s hopelessly impractical but incredibly transparent. Come down to Nice some time and I’ll give you a demo. I’m still, 25 years later, blown away by how clean it is. I use heavily modified Atma-Sphere MA60s, which are still available new.
Now all the gold plated, solid silver monocrystal cables at £1000/foot – couldn’t agree more. Hi end hifi is full of crazy stuff and – importantly – gullible people willing to spend their money on it.
Peter wrote:
It was all fake of course like gold plated mains plugs, valve amps are a crazy idea
My favourite is “deuterium oxide shielded cables”. The cables were literally inside a tube of heavy (or so they said) water.
