[Radio Wrangler]

You don't need a Q meter to measure the Q of one coil. It's not too bad to cobble together a test rig if you have some other test instruments.

You can do it with a stable sig gen and a spare receiver.

Also, an oscillator doesn't necessarily have to have a high Q resonator in order to run at all, but it does help a lot in cleanliness of theoutput signal (low phase noise). Most valve oscillators are self-biasing. Oscillation builds up until a little bit of grid current causes rectification which self-generates negative bias for the grid and thereby levels off the gain and anode current. They can have quite a bit of excess gain at start-up.

Might be interesting to have a milliammeter in either the anode or cathode path to see what happens on the various ranges.

David