The problem with determing "similar" is that it's easy to find a charger with the same physical features, but it's the technical determinations that the designer puts into the software that is what actually makes for a really good, or not, charger.

I looked at the Hughes as an Alpha-4 replacement for three reasons:
1. It utilizes 4 ports which I really like in a bench charger.
2. It adds the capability of taking care of additional chemistries beyond just Nicad. (The Alpha-4 will handle NimH on a couple of it's "devices", but it's still not optimized for NimH batteries due to the difference in Delta-V characteristics between Nicad and NimH batteries).
3. It boosts the available charge rates.

The thing is, those are what I referred to as "physical" characteristics, and I cannot personally say if the design parameters in the software are equal to the seemingly perfect parameter choices that Peter made and incorporated into the Alpha-4.

I recently bought the HobbyKing Quattro 4x6s charger, another charger that has the same added physical characteristics of the Hughes (but significantly less expensive). I've been playing with it, but a problem (well, not a "problem", but rather, a "feature") is that the Quattro allows you to set your own parameters that are key to cycling and charging Nicad and NimH batteries.
The Quattro does use what looks like reasonably good Delta-V default settings for Nicad (Default = 12mv drop) and NimH batteries (Default = 7mv), but the user can also over-ride those settings and change them. That's cool if you are "into" batteries, but changing those Default settings could also get you into trouble.
Also, the Quattro lets you set the bottom voltage for stopping the cycle process, and lets you fine-tune the charge rate and cycle rate. With the Alpha-4, you got to chose just one of 4 different rates by programming whatever number of ports to do that. With the Quattro, not only can you set those rates, but you can set them to go way beyond (cycle AND charge rates) what the Alpha-4 allows. So there's plenty of room for variation with the Quattro that I'm trying to account for with regard to how it "talks" to batteries compared to the Alpha-4.

That's why I asked in the OP to see if anyone actually knew what those two settings were that I mentioned, because those two settings form a "bracket" between which the charger will use to report the capacity of a battery at the end of a discharge and charge cycle. The greater the "distance" between those two points, the greater the capacity of the battery that will be reported. (And by the way, the Quattro also allows you to set a maximum "amperage in" and a timer setting, both of which will terminate the charge at user-selected safety points. If set wrong, the charger could terminate the charge too early which would result in a report of lesser battery capacity).

At the moment, my Quattro is reporting my three brand new Nicad packs as having an average capacity of about 1300mah when they are actually 1700mah packs. At the same time, the Alpha-4 cycles and reports those same packs as having capacities averaging about 1750mah (typical for healthy, brand new batteries).
So what I'd like to do is to set the Quattro at exactly the same trip points I asked for in the OP, as well as setting similar charge and discharge rates as the Alpha-4 uses, and then see how that changes the capacity report of these packs.

I do not know if the Hughes allows more or less custom settings than does the Quattro, but whether it does or not, it's fair to assume that the designer of the Hughes did not "exactly" set the Hughes to work "identically" to the Alpha-4, so I would assume from the get-go that you would not get exactly the same capacity reports from the Hughes as you would from the Alpha-4 either. And that would also mean that the Hughes wouldn't be expected to charge and maintain batteries in "exactly" the same way as the Alpha-4. Since the Alpha-4 has been proven over time to be a virtually "perfect" charger for Nicads, it follows that if the Hughes does things in slightly different ways, then it may not be "as good" as the Alpha-4 in some ways.
I'm not stating that the Hughes is a lesser charger than the Alpha-4, only making a logical conclusion that the Hughes and the Alpha-4 cannot work exactly the same since they were designed by different people who may have used slightly different paradigms in their design.

I just wish that Peter (Litco) would have gone on and upgraded his charger to incorporate similar physical features as the Quattro or Hughes. If the Alpha-4 would have been upgraded to being able to properly charge and balance the new battery technology at reasonably higher rates (including tweaking the software for NimH battery maintenance), and kept all the same characteristics of Nicad charging, I would never have looked elsewhere for a new charger.
I think that Peter really screwed up when he walked away from the business because he had a built-in customer base for new sales that other companies couldn't have even dreamed of.