The Utracer is great and will give you much more information than even a Gm Tester will give you. Definitely worth considering, especially if you also want to match power tubes down the road.
If you just want a go/no-go tester, all of the vintage ones will do the job of telling you how much life is left in the cathode. This is all that the emission testers will do, which is the vast majority of vintage testers out there.
If you also want to get an idea of Gm relative to different tubes, then only a few of the vintage ones will do that in addition to testing for cathode emission. These cost more than emission testers, of course. All the Hickoks (with a couple of exceptions) do Gm, as do models by Triplett, Western Electric (made by Hickok) and Stark (also made by Hickok). In the UK, Taylor and AVO made excellent units that test for Gm.
The thing you want to watch out for with vintage testers is tube settings and socket support. There are plenty of Hickok models that sell for stupid money that came out in the 40s or 50s that you may not be able to find updated charts for. That means you wouldn’t be able to test tubes that came onto the market a little later, like the 6DJ8, EF86, some of the subminis, nuvistors or compactrons. Even if the tester has the right sockets (not all do) or supports add-on sockets through a plug-in extender (like the Hickok C4or C5), the updated charts for that model may be non-existent or hard to find. Many people find that out too late.
An example is the Hickok 539A. It looks just like the 539C, which sells for idiotic sums. But it’s an earlier model and you can’t use the 539C settings charts with it. There are no updated charts with all the later tubes available for that model. So you end up with a boat anchor that won’t allow you to test all the tubes you may need to test.
Less expensive models that have updated charts (some as late as the early 70s) are the cheaper ones that were used by your average TV repairman. The 600a and 800a come to mind. You can find these for less than $200 a lot of times.
Just do your homework if you decide to go with a Hickok. You can get burned easily if you don’t.
FWIW, I still use a 750 (one of the FAA models) with the C4 compactron/nuvistor adapter. I have the 1963 settings chart (the most recent available for that model) which has most tubes I want to test, but I still run into less common tubes now and then that I can’t test. Overall, i’m happy with it, but I still sometimes wish i’d Just gone with the common 600a or 800a.
BT