Info on IN-3B lamps

[Andrea Zambon]

Hello everyone,

I just bought a few of these IN-3B lamps (not the regular IN-3, these are much longer, see the pictures).

The problem is that I searched left and right and I couldn't find any info on them, at all. They don't even have any marking on the glass bulb.

Does anyone have any info on them or, even better, a datasheet? In the pictures I was running them at around 1.5mA, but I have no idea whether this is an acceptable figure for these lamps.

The blue "haze" in the glass is a camera artifact. In person they have the regular neon orange color.

Regards,

Andrea

[Dekatron42]

This Russian website has a little information on them but even there they are not sure of their manufacture and data - they are used in Christmas lighting and also some photo lamps.

https://old-lighting.ru/ru/content/3b-1-gazotron

some more items using them:

https://old-lighting.ru/ru/exposition/3230/exponat_luminaire

/Martin

[Mac Doktor]

You beat me to it, Martin, but it's a good thing I was interrupted before sending my reply. If nothing else these links saved me the trouble of taking photos.  8D

On Feb 16, 2022, at 4:39 PM, Dekatron42 <martin....@gmail.com> wrote:

This Russian website has a little information on them but even there they are not sure of their manufacture and data - they are used in Christmas lighting and also some photo lamps.

Martin, thank you very much for finding that site!!!    *_*

I have two of those stars. One of my other hobbies is collecting old Christmas lights and I have a number of Soviet "New Year's" (most definitely not "Christmas") lighted decorations. I use a variac and a 1:2 transformer to get 220V RMS.

On Feb 16, 2022, at 2:09 PM, Andrea Zambon <andrea....@gmail.com> wrote:

I just bought a few of these IN-3B lamps (not the regular IN-3, these are much longer, see the pictures).

I've seen them referred to as both IN-3V (ИН-3В) and IN-3B (ИН-3Б) on eBay but this Russian site is a gold mine of new info! 22kΩ it is.

The blue "haze" in the glass is a camera artifact. In person they have the regular neon orange color.

My first thought is that the fill gas contains some mercury because the blue glow is coming from the glass itself. I have a mercury spectral lamp and when I first powered it up the glass fluoresced much brighter (in the visible spectrum) than the ionized mercury. Perhaps the power supply I had on hand was supplying too much current. If so, I only used it for a brief time and hopefully no harm was done.

Also, digital imagers are sensitive to UV and direct exposure to a UV source can appear as a bright magenta, meaning that UV is either passing through the red filters in the Bayer matrix or that the filter material itself is fluorescing. 

I need to do some research on that as it spoils my Halloween videos. I have camcorders with both CCD and CMOS imagers and even with the exposure greatly reduced a 15W "black light" fluorescent tube is so bright that the blue and red pixels are fully saturated at 255.

Terry Bowman, KA4HJH
"The Mac Doctor"

"If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes."—Roy Batty, Blade Runner

[Charles MacDonald]

On 2022-02-16 20:22, Mac Doktor wrote:

> I need to do some research on that as it spoils my Halloween videos. I
> have camcorders with both CCD and CMOS imagers and even with the
> exposure greatly reduced a 15W "black light" fluorescent tube is so
> bright that the blue and red pixels are fully saturated at 255.

A regular "UV" filter (not a skylight filter, although those are
supposed to be a more aggressive cut) does not help? I know with some
camcorders you would have to tape the filter to the front of the lens.
The UV filters were intended to cut the Blue Haze when using Kodachrome,
and so some sold these days are just "Protection" filters to keep the
lens clean.

Might be worth a test with both the UV and Skylight to see what happens.

--
Charles MacDonald VA3CPY Stittsville Ontario
cm...@zeusprune.ca Just Beyond the Fringe
No Microsoft Products were used in sending this e-mail.

[liam bartosiewicz]

Those look like something someone made at home, or at least something that could be made at home with the right setup.

On Feb 16, 2022, at 5:22 PM, Mac Doktor <themac...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Andrea Zambon]

Hello,

thank you all for the info!

That Russian site seems to imply that they were only used in products sold by the same factory that made the lamps. If they were indeed "internal use only", it makes sense that they had no markings or that no datasheet for them can be found.

The double designation IN-3V (ИН-3В) and IN-3B (ИН-3Б) sounds suspicious to me: perhaps someone at some point incorrectly transliterated ИН-3В to IN-3B, which was then transliterated back to ИН-3Б. Maybe?

I did a little simulation and, assuming 155V voltage drop across the lamp, 220V RMS with a 22k resistor produces a current of slightly over 4mA RMS. In my experiments I was running the lamps at 1.5mA, so yeah, I was using way too little current.

If I up the voltage to 230V RMS (what we have here in Italy, at least nominally), then increasing the resistor value to 24k yields the same RMS current. Next time I'll try this arrangement.

Best regards,

Andrea

[Andrea Zambon]

Hello,

I just wanted to let you know that the lamps work perfectly at 230V RMS with a 24k resistor. That setup produces currents between 4.0 and 4.3 mA RMS, depending on the lamp.

I also tested with a 27k resistor, and that was closer to 3.8mA. In an application where these lamps have to run 24/7, I'd probably opt for the latter value.

Some assorted pics of the test setup. In all pictures the scope is set to 100V per division.
The second one shows the "mains" waveform (which is actually coming from a small 6VA transformer inside the blue box. The minor dip when the voltage is increasing is due to the transformer's high impedence).

The third and fourth pics show the mains voltage and the voltage drop across the 24k resistor.

The last pic is the voltage across the lamp.

(yes, the scope could use some cleaning :-) )

Best regards,

Andrea