National SW-54 Thoughts

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by Dubis7

I did a little more research. Looks like if I pick up a frequency counter I can get a better idea on whether I have any output.

Any suggestions on models to pick up?

I have to admit, I feel like I'm burying myself in a hole here. It sounds like I need a known good signal generator before I can fix my radio, but I'm having a bear of a time figuring out whether my generator is any good. Is there really no way to take, say, an AM radio transmitter (which I have one of that I know works because I use it daily) and just directly run the antenna output to the grids of the tubes?

That won't work unless the you only inject between the antenna and the converter/mixer stage, your transmitter is capable of being tuned to 455KHz, or the radio is a TRF set.
One other thing you can do is if you have a working analog tuned AM radio you can run it at the same time as the set you are working on and dial around the AM band tuning on both...at some point the oscillators will be at the same freq and beat against each other creating a whistle...if you have two working AM sets put them next to each other and you can observe this behavior.

I use a vintage Tripplet 7000 counter....not because it good so much as it works and was the first cheap used counter I could find.

At RF/IF tube service generators often are non-sinusoidal and produce a double humped wine wave some generators can't accurately read. My best solution to dial my tube Heathkit generator in on frequencies under 30MHz is to dial in the digital tuner of my Sony ICF-SW7600GR world band radio to the desired freq then play with the generator till the Sony gets peak reception then hook the Heathkit up to the vintage radio I plan to align.