Use of 12V Ac Power Supply in Ham Radio?

[vinlove]

Can it be any use in ham radio?
I found this 12V AC 1.5A PSU but cannot see any use for it.
Any one?

[Stray Electron]

  Use it to make an octopus component checker.  Those can be amazingly useful to identify components that appear to a meter to be good but that have partial shorts or other bizarre problems.

[vinlove]

Yes, it looks a very useful device. Thanks for your info.

[vinlove]

Surely, there must have been more needs / uses for these 12V AC Power Supplies, so they had been manufactured?

[ledtester]

Can it be only made with 12V AC PSU?  Can a 12V DC PSU be made to do the same job?

An AC power supply is a simple and convenient way to apply a time-varying voltage to the component under test.

https://www.jammarcade.net/simple-component-tester-a-k-a-octopus-curve-tracer/

[Ian.M]

Also, if fed to a pair of opposite polarity half wave rectifiers and reservoir capacitors, you can get both positive and negative DC rails, which is very convenient for powering many analog circuits, especially ones using OPAMPs.

Nowadays one could use a DC-DC converter for the negative rail, but EMI can be a major concern, and also the rail will come up after the positive rail which may cause problems for some ICs that have strict power sequencing requirements.

[vinlove]

Great info. Thanks.
The octopus component checker device looks very useful.

[TheBay]

They are incredibly useful, most Hameg Analogue scopes have one built in.