Ideas for a power supply?

[Nigel Goodwin]

No, actually I'm powering my tube's filament from a separate supply. It's an ecl82; so I believe the voltage is 6.3 volts for the filament winding.

The 'E' at the beginning specifies 6.3V heater - a 'P' would be 300mA, or a 'U' 100mA (both PCL82 and UCL82 were common valves as well) - P's were normally televisions, and U's for AC/DC radios.

The common double triodes ECC83 etc. had a centre tapped heater, and could be wired as either 6.3V or 12.6V.

 

[Gamma Ray]

I've restored radios from the early 1930's. They all had full wave rectification using dual plate tubes (type 80) and centre tapped transformer secondaries. I recommended a bridge rectifier in this case to avoid the need for a centre tap. You are correct that the the power supply filters typically used a smoothing choke. In radios, it was the field coil for the speaker. So it served dual duty. Electrolytics came out in the early 1930's, and values up to at least 30μF were available. Almost no tube based consumer electronics used a regulated supply. Certain sections of tube colour TV's used voltage regulators, but that was the exception. High end lab equipment (eg., Hewlett Packard, Tektronix) were about the only things that used regulated supplies.

From over 60 years ago, I seem to remember a 'humbucking coil' in a speaker which supplied an anti-phase voltage to cancel or reduce hum.

 

[Reloadron]

Hammond a popular name in transformers and others still make what I commonly called a B+ transformer. Here is an example. I would just find or buy an old transformer and drive the primary with a variac since you already have filament supply. One problem is high voltage filter caps are not as common as they once were. They are costly.

Much better link to Hammond.

Ron