Please don’t go! Your posts have the best information about street lights.

I certainly enjoy your pictures and posts. Please stay!

I don’t think you should, I definitely appreciate your posts here, even though sometimes I don’t respond to everything. 

...unless members can convince me otherwise.

Gosh, why are you all so helpful?

Good to know.

Also, gold coating is used on that bare burner style UVA-UVB suntanning metal halides. Sure, no photoemission in the air, but I suspect a part of the reason is also that expensive golden look of the lamps

I ran it up to full brightness and measured the voltage and current: 83v, 1.73a

Sure the smell is some organics like 20 years worth of dust burning off.

No one can tell you about the cooling now until you have an access to the actual projector to look. In the original design the fan probably blows from the side. Cooling too aggressively will not harm, but will prevent the lamp from running-up completely, obviously.

Well I think it is neon because there is no known fluorescent tube of that shape and blue streaks on the picture look similar to what you expect to see in uncoated neon tube electrode ends typically attached at 90 degrees.

Okay. Proper terminology is hot cathode and cold cathode, related to the mode of injection of electrons from power supply into the discharge. Otherwise, discharge column physics in fluorescent and mercury filled 'neon' tubes is exactly the same and you can just not tell them by the look! So I have just a guess! There was also custom shape sign tubes but with hot cathodes.

Good to know electronic neon supplies run with close to the sinewave voltage and current, so radiate a little interference beyond main frequency of 20-50kHz and some lower harmonics, so not to worry much.

 

Also, should the cooling fan be positioned like this?