Well, you can easily

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Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms


"ian field" wrote in message
...
What's the best approach to testing salvaged germanium transistors?

Even the peak atlas transistor analyser reads leakage current as gain
current and the DMMs I have are completely useless at testing germanium
transistors. Somewhere I have a schematic for a transistor tester that
nulls out the leakage before taking a gain measurement, the leakage is
read off the calibrated null pot, but I'm wondering whether it might be
better to measure the AC gain?

What I'm thinking of is driving the transistor under test with an
oscillator with its output clipped by an inverse parallel pair of diodes
and measuring the rectified output of the TUT to calculate gain.

One particular advantage I'm thinking of, is an amplifier can be added to
evaluate how much hiss the TUT contributes.

The clever bit would be deciding what biasing circuit to use that would
betray the leakage figure by simple voltage measurement under DC
conditions.

Any comments/suggestions welcome.

TIA.