Comment Re:Story time (Score 3, Interesting) 276
Yes, tubes and fets share various characteristics, but there are a lot of things they don't share and I guarantee you that a good grounding (hah!) in fets of all kinds isn't sufficient to go off and do tube design beyond the very simplest applications. There have been some seriously weird tubes with no corresponding single-semiconductor solution; quite aside from the huge range of voltages involved, there are screen grids, directly heated cathodes, gas-filled regulators, CRTs (imagine depending on knowledge of a FET to make a CRT work, eh?), coupling issues, various kinds of noise peculiar to tubes, weird stuff like microphonics, just a whole host of interesting issues and devices. Plus, things you'd take as similar act quite differently, even starting just from a rectifier diode. And tubes glow in the dark. You're thinking orange, right? But an OA2 in normal operation is a beautiful, bright purple. And there are tubes that are green bar graphs, tubes that can display characters...
Yes, that ham made a huge difference for me, and I try to do the same - happy to wear the "Elmer" hat. Been an extra class for decades now. Also, lately, been working on a free software defined radio app, so in way, I'm getting right back to my roots.