One of the lost pleasures of our modern world is the experience of going shopping at a grocery store, a mall, or a drugstore, and finding this month’s electronics magazine festooned with projects that you might like to build. Sure, you can find anything on the Internet, but there’s something to be said about the element of surprise. Can any of those old projects still be of interest?
[Bettina Neumryr] thinks so. She has a hobby of finding old magazine projects and building them. Her most recent installment is a transistor tester from the June 1983 issue of Everyday Electronics.
The tester was quite a neat job for 1983, with a neat case and a PC board. It measures beta and leakage. There’s an analog meter that can measure the collector current for a fixed base current (beta or hfe). Leakage is how much current flows between emitter and collector with the base turned off.
In 1983, we’d have loved to have a laser printer to do toner transfer for the PC board, but of course, that was unheard of in hobby circles of the day. The tester seemed to work right off the bat, although there was a small adjustment necessary to calibrate the device. All that was left was to put it in a period-appropriate box with some printed labels.
We loved the old electronics and computer magazines. Usually, when we see someone working on an old magazine project, it is probably not quite a literal copy of it. But either way is cool.
I built that!
Takes me back to my youth!
Now many cheap DMMs will do this almost as an afterthought.
But I still prefer an analog meter. This is how you become old and out of touch :-(
I still love getting my copy of Silicon Chip every month! https://www.siliconchip.com.au/
It’s an excellent electronics magazine, but suffers from shipping with middleman Disticor gouging people in Canada. Practical Electronics one issue price is $17.50, so the days of reading a magazine are dying due to that. PE merged with SC last year I think. Yes PDF electronic blah blah but SC used that old Flash-based cloud crap for many years to copy-protect and you could not archive your collection to read off-line. Now I just need A4 sized binders lol.
This project reminds me of the Don Lancaster transistor test from the December 1967 issue of Popular Electronics (p. 57). Around this time, one could buy unmarked transistors by the pound, so a transistor tester was useful. I would sort the transistors and use them to build RTL gates. I still have the tester, but I typically use the feature on my multimeter instead.
The test voltage is only 3.5V for the transistor being tested. No good for me, I am at 40V for matching diff amp transistors in audio power amp, mic preamp front-ends etc.
If it had a boost-converter then I would build it.
Back then if you wanted to make a toner transfer PCB, you would just photocopy the PCB artwork from the magazine. The old, analog photocopiers worked better than modern laser printers because they could make a darker print.
Also way back then almost every town had an Electronics Store, I lived in a town of 25,000 and it had a nice electronics store, but today I think the greater Seattle area has only one electronics store. However the internet has made other option like Digikey and other large online catalogs available.
Interesting math in the video: “twelve times five is a hundred and ten”.
I have estimated something like 60 for 12*5, but what do I know?
So the readings for the second Germanium transistor are actually relatively consistent in my world.