Sorry I missed this and am a bit late replying. Just call it a senior moment. I could claim that I've been busy building things for the last month, but all I've done is an UglyFace. And changed out the dead and dying opto couplers in my Blackface Bandmasters. And built the old lady some frames for raised bed gardening. And moved around a ton of gardening soil to fill them. And getting the front bathroom ready to put in a shale tile floor. And... Damn, I thought retirement was supposed to be relaxing.phibes wrote:The AC176's sound like a cool idea. Where those fall gain wise?
Picked up a batch of 100 of the AC176's around a year ago. Ran them through the test setup (made a quicky board last year with RG's test circuit just to save breadboard space) and the end result was a bell curve, as you would expect with that many random trannies. low end had Hfe's in the 40s, high end had a couple in the 130s but most of them clustered in the 60s to 80s. Leakage pretty much followed the Hfe values with variations from around 200ua up to a couple that were over 500ua. They seem to average around 100-150ua higher leakage than the equivalent gain AC128's I have, but with the exception of the over 500ua examples they should all be usable. The one very low leakage one in the batch with a 55ua reading only has a Hfe of 23, so I don't have a use for that one as of yet.
I really really doubt that I will end up building 75 - 80 germ dirt boxes with the couple hundred PNPs and NPNs in the parts bins, but you never know...