Hey! An inquiry to an AI just brought me here. I just built one of these. V11. I have been using it for a little bit now. Learning, exploring, getting a feel for it. It's A LOT different from the testers I have been using for a long time now - Hickoks: 6000A, 539C, RD1575, 752A, TV-7D/U; Heathkit TT-1; B&K 747 and 707, and some random others. I wanted to get away from testers that are going on 50-70+ years old. I looked at the contemporary offerings and decided on the RoeTest.
It was a lot of work. Doable. It's not like building an modern fighter jet or space telescope, but it's a lot of work. I don't have a 3D printer (which would be pretty darned cool)! It took several months once I got into the project.
Helmut Weigl is GREAT. He is super responsive and indefatigably helpful. Reichelt is great; really great. Prices are (were) good. They take care of all the international shipping stuff.
I had a few challenges. It's complex build. IT IS NOT A KIT. This isn't like building a Dynakit, Bottlehead kit, or the like. No step by step stuff. Outside of the parts BOM and the proprietary bits supplied by Helmut, there is a lot more stuff to be spec'ed, selected, and sourced, and careful, precision assembly, fabrication, finishing, and calibration is required. Calibration isn't especially difficult. If you build the calibration test box, which I strongly recommend, it's all done by multimeter. Importantly, keeping the tester calibrated is effectively much more doable compared with vintage testers.
I followed closely to Helmut's recipe. I didn't improvise, as cool as some of the builds I've seen have been. The "construction" manual is a guide. Helmut's tools, like the parts database, are super helpful, and there is a lot of documentation. That's good, but it's not tightly organized into something like a manual, with glosses, indices, etc. I went all metric; hardware, drillings/taps, and other miscellany. Some of the parts are hard to source in the US markets (I had to buy a few things more recently from US suppliers and those parts already had tariff mark ups), like the DIN connectors.
The Helmut-supplied bits are very high quality. The boards are excellent. The toroidal transformers are super nice. V11 looks to me to be the best sorted of all the RoeTest models.
There are LOADS of features. Extensive electrical parameters can be managed automatically or manually. Curve tracing, yes, but with curve analysis tools. Tube inventory system tools. Loads of data printout options. It's a system. It's kind of amazing. Helmut appears to be exceptionally clever and busy.
It's not an inexpensive thing to build, just even at the parts cost, but to buy something like this built would have to be quite a few multiples more pricey than that.
Working in English from the German can be a little tricky. Documentation translation, including the interfacing software, is well good.
Given what I know about most of the vintage testers, the ones that most of us this deep into this might likely have, not the full-on bench lab tube analyzers, those testers weren't especially accurate. I suspect we can do much better today with testers like this (and some of the other modern ambitious testers, like the Amplitrex).
You will likely want to check/confirm the tube test settings for whatever tubes you're testing. I have long been familiar with vacuum tube datasheets. With all the vintage testers I've used, you follow the settings provided on a sheet of paper, in a book or on a roll chart, turn some knobs and dials, and press the test button or pull the test switch. And I had some idea of what each of these vintage testers applied for various parameters, but they weren't things I could muck with. With the RoeTest you can adjust/specify operating points. The large tube reference/settings database will likely have settings for the tubes you want to test, but check/confirm the parameters. The database is open to user contribution. Super smartly, too, the interface software does some checks on the data/settings validity that will not allow a test if some parameters are missing or wrong.
I ordered all my bits and pieces as Helmut was transitioning from V10 to V11. The faceplate I got still read V10, but Helmut supplied that V11 sticker you see on the faceplate of my finished RoeTest.
If I you might want any help, I'll offer what I can.
Once all is up and running, it's super easy. It can essentially automatically run through a tube test process, outputting an EXTENSIVE report of tube condition. FAR more than any of the vintage testers did/could, and all with the click of a button in the software interface.
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