Here is an old news article, dating a few years back, about Bill Davis and his Company, Salt Lake Instrument Service.




Proprietor of S.L. electronics shop specializes in gear that keeps old radios alive and buzzing.

In the late 1930s, a West High student named Bill Davis built a primitive one-tube radio. To his elation, it picked up a broadcast from Lima, Peru.
Davis was hooked on electronics.
Today, Davis, 75, is proprietor of Salt Lake Instrument Service, 129W. 1700 South. For radio buffs and browsers, the shop is a fascinating realm packed with oscilloscopes, radios, vacuum tubes, transmitters and many harder-to-recognize types of electronic gear.
"He knows where everything in that shop is," said Jerry Wellman, a local amateur radio operator. "I'll go in the shop looking for an obscure connector, and he'll go in the back, rummage around a bit, and say, 'Oh yeah, here it is.'"
Mostly, Davis sells vacuum tubes, a type of technology that headed toward extinction decades ago with the advent of the transistor. The shop has many thousands of tubes, representing all previous eras of electronics.
Davis buys military surplus equipment and the collections of ham-radio operators. Sometimes, he said, the wives of amateur radio jockeys make them clean out their basements and they sell the old tubes to Davis.
In turn, he retails radio tubes to customers around the world, mostly buffs who want to keep aging equipment running.
" I have 150,000 tubes. Ideal in tubes all over the United States, and I have a fellow who comes over from Tokyo and buys lots of tubes."
He estimates that 70 to 80 percent of them are still in the original boxes. As long as the tubes retain their vacuum they're useable.
" I've got tubes that date back to the 1940s that are better than the tubes they made in the 1970s," he said. " The quality control then was a lot better than it was in the '70s."
Recently, a local man bought four tubes dating to the 1920s, which he needed to restore the first-model RCA radio. They cost $50 each and they worked.
During World War II, Davis served in the Navy, rising from third-class electrician to first -class radio technician. He maintained radio equipment aboard ships, including the USS Marathon, which was torpedoed near Okinawa and lost 46 crewmen.
He began selling radio tubes in the 19040's. "I've been doing instrument repair work for 46 years," he said.
Why would anybody use vacuum tubes today, with all the new radios with microchip brains and transistor hearts?
"You take somebody that's brought up in the era, and right today they would prefer a tube-type amplifier than a transistor-type amplifier. It gets a better sound…it's a matter of personal preference."
Besides, Davis said, if you overload a vacuum tube, it'll probably remain useable. "If you over load a transistor, that's it."
As long as there's a demand for the ancient equipment, Davis plans to stay in business. "I have no desire to retire," he added.
So if anyone needs an exotic old vacuum tube, to repair that Heathkit shortwave radio in the attic, Davis is the man to see.
-By Joseph Bauman, Deseret news staff writer.