And for my next trick...

Well,

You will remember back here where I was talking about a complete waste of time?

So, I've persisted with the referb and finally I have a working unit. It's now permanently installed in the pile of test gear.

Apart from the repairs, I have replaced the electrolytic caps in the PSU:

And bodged together "Option 001" which is the extra digit:

Works rather well:

Not bad, is it?

Yet more Nixies!

Well,

My TEAS (Test Equipment Acquisition Syndrome) condition seems to worsen; I have acquired another Nixie frequency counter from that great auction site.

I've fiddled around with it considerably to get the internal clock to stabilise - some bright spark, maybe even the designer, has stuck a block of polystyrene (Styrofoam) over the crystal to try and maintain some temperature stability - but alas its all over the shop.

So, I've basically hacked two holes into the back of the unit and added an external reference clock input - this can be supplied by my ever faithful shack frequency reference.

So this is the unit; albeit on its side:

And here the small modification I've made:

The circuit forces whatever signal is on the input to be +ve DC - I've built it dead bug style on the back of the input BNC socket:

This is where I was poking about to find the clock output:

Using some of my other ancient test gear acquired through my TEAS condition:

Here's the result:

Lovely Jubbly.