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Ralph Mowery

In article ,
says...
f your objective is to gain knowledge and apply it to servicing other types of equipment, then getting a 'middle of the road' tester is probably worth it. But it depends on the financial risk you want to take.
From my experience, B&K 700 and 707 were fairly standard in repair shops (not engineering shops)Last I checked, a working one on fleabay was around $100 USD.

Seems like the ebay price has gone way up on the testers now. Most
worth while are in the $ 300 and up including shipping.

A person can buy a lot of new old stock tubes for that.

Sometimes one can get lucky. I bought one at a hamfest a month a go for
$ 55. It in the mutual conductance type. It was made around 1950. It
did come with an adaptor and book for many of the more modern tubes.
Interisting way to check the multielement compactrons. There is a
special socket that allows the tube to be rotated so that the 9 wires
from the tester can be placed on all the elements, just not all at the
same time.

I don't really like to use a tube tester, but just thought it would be
something to play with after not having one for about 50 years.

Most of the time it is quicker for me to takea few voltage readings and
resistance readings and feed a signal in to the circuit. I have found
on many of the older electronics to suspect the capacitors and carbon
resistors first. If a tube lights up , it is seldom bad if the getter
is bright silver.