What exactly are you sharing "How to keep" your manual gain or is this is a mod to make a auto gain tube have manual gain work?

This is a 5 piece, simple as fuck pigtail design for those of us that need pigtails and don't want to pay $80-100 a pigtail from some fucc bois on the net who hoard them. Or L3 who just won't even reply to an email. I've searched all over and no one has shared a simple version of the pigtail. Usually you get sent to the patent and shown a circuit diagram that makes sense to no one. This one uses regular wire so you don't have to solder to that piece of shit ribbon (unless you have ribbon sunk into the acrylic version of the tube, then you're gonna have to do it with lots of flux and curse words) and uses simple resistors. You gotta lay them low on the board or as our boy CJ7HAWK says "off the side a bit" to get them to fit in the housing. The patent calls for two trim pots, but good luck finding two pots that will fit and isn't all that necessary anyway since the pots are wired and fixed and don't ever really need to be adjusted. You can throw fucks into the wind here and just give yourself a wide range of high and low and be just as good. The LOW will be your biggest issue. Not low enough and you won't get the sparkles of based noise that for some reason people think are needed or good. Don't do sparkles.

Manual gain is retarded (NB4 someone comes along WELL ACTUALLY) but since nightvision is 99% omg im new whats this and 1% omg i know about nightvision so im magical I made this (13 prototypes to find the easiest, most efficient method, that fits) to at least let you retards be able to solder up a manual gain board to keep on the side so you don't have to go on ebay and buy an 80 dollar ribbon or ask around here just to get smoke blown in your face.

AS far as your second question: ALL NIGHTVISION ALREADY HAS AUTO GAIN CONTROL. It's already there. What the pigtail does is run parallel to it setting a high and low for the auto gain control which becomes known as the EAGC OR EGAC fuck I can't remember. Any auto tube can be hacked into a manual gain control but I would never, ever do that because that's dumb, but that's what the original patent did. It took basic af tubes that were perfectly fine and made them more expensive and complicated so ITT could get their ass ate.

i think its how to make a spare pigtail - if l3 wont sell you one - be nice to know if there is a trick to make a 10160 into a 11768 (i have seen some 11768 with a repair or mod on the top as if something had been done like digging in to it then siliconing over again above the gain screw )

You could but no reason to. Why?

Theres no simple trick to turn s 10160 power supply into a 11769 power supply that uses a pigtail  as far as a diy home brew kind of deal that I canncome up with. It may be possible but it wouldnr be easy. Far from it actually. It would require going into the power supply itself and modifying the automatic gain circuit to allw manual gain then adding the right stuff to allow the connection of a pigtail. Then if you did that you would still have to remedy the fact that you webt into an encapsulated hv circuit and you dug away at the encapsulant and must reinsulate everything sonthe hv current isnt able to escape from the are you just dug a hole into on the power supply. It might be something someone is able to do but most would not be able to perform such a task. There are digital programmable power supplies made by L-3 that allow the pigtail to be removed from the power supply and the tube can safely run as a 10160 and then the tail can also be plugged back in and tube can once again be run as a 11769. This is a neat feature however there are no trim pots on these for adjusting the gain or brightness such as those on the older 10160 tubes and to have them adjusted one would have to find domeone with the programming interface to adjust those settngs. I posses one of these and the issue isnt a problem for me and I can use these power supplies when I rebuild tubes. However onlyba very few people outside of L-3 have one of these programmers and so most everyone else who doesnt wont be able to tune L-3 tubes at all.

As for the power supplies that have the stuff stuck on the "gain screw" are actually ITT omni 4 and 5 production tubes that were sold to the military. These were the very first 11769's that were introduced around 1997 if I remember right. There is no gain screw under the black adhesive, only the connection posts for the pigtail, which is just where the gain pot was relocated to on the little pcb at the end of the pigtail. The power supplies were made rhis way by KM electronics which is who used to make the power supplies used with itt tubes up until kind of recently when they were bought by ITT.  that happebed around 2008 or something like that. They never had a gain pot with an adjustment screw physically on the power supply. Only one for the ABC adjustment. Im almost positive these are the power supplues used on the tubes your reffering to as " modified". They are not though. They are factory original in that form.

Also if you have a 10160 and wabt a "manual gain" feature just get a housing that uses c mount lenses with manual aperatures. This will be much less expensive than buying new 11769 abd also much much easier than trying to go about some impractical, near impossible for most mofification to a 10160 tongive it a working pigtail. A 10160 with a manual aperature lens mounted in fron of it does the exact same thing that a 11769 does in letting the user manulally control how much light is allowed to enter the photocathode. They just do it in different ways that acheice the same result. 11769 does it electronically and the 10160/manual aperature lens combo do it optically.

Ok, heads up on these pigtails. They work great on ITT tubes Omni 7 or lower. I tried them on the Omni 8 tubes with the nano plug style ribbon and the gain wouldn't operate correctly. It would either dim completely with very little adjustment or dim all the way and then when pushed to the limit of the manual gain adjustment, fail open. So, if you have nano plug style tubes this is def a no go. As far as the above, the 11769 tube was just the 10160 tube with the gain ribbon inserted to allow a range of adjustments in conjunction with the factory set pot inside the housing, it didn't pull anything off the power supplies being used probably until later as the circuit got more sophisticated or whatever (hard to find info on ribbons, I've seen 3 different types and 3 different style of connections on tubes to attach the ribbon). It's only needed in some situations and is something new people get stuck on because they think they need it. You don't. You won't be adjusting your shit on the fly, because for us, we can adjust the amount of light and the ABC circuit does fine anyway. Don't get hung up on stupid shit. Even shitty Gen 3 is good night vision, just make sure you keep the tube a bit dimmer than needed for better clarity and less noise. Noise fucks shit up worse than it being a little too dark.

If you want to see where or how your tube acts with a different resistor value, simply take a 500k ohm pot, slave pins 2 and 3, connect pin 1 to the left side of the ribbon contacts, connect pin 2 to the right side post of the ribbon contact and run the wires to outside the unit while you then power it on. Twist the pot till the image has sparkles, then twist it down to no sparkles. Unpower the unit and remove the tube, ohmmeter pins 1 and 2 on the pot and that'll give you the resistance you need to set for a set resistance. Remember most resistors are 10% + -. Oh and I think in the OP the pic says 1/8w, but you can use 1/4w. The limiting factor here is size, which is why using two pots is a no go unless you spend some serious dough to get the really tiny ones. But since they are just set to some basic bitch resistance anyway, using them instead of two resistors is thinking like a large corp that needs to ensure it works for a wide range, not you trying to make a mod work for your one tube so you can hurr durr twist a knob.