Quote:
Originally Posted by TIMTAPE
I probably mentioned this before but when I worked for a company servicing Phillips dictation gear we had those Germaniums regularly break down. We discovered it was always a "base to case" short and I think we ended up placing an insulating washer between the case and the chassis, or something like that.
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I wonder if that's because the base in these transistors is actually a large (-ish) slab of germanium, compared to the other electrodes which are small 'lumps' on the base substrate, so the likelyhood of a 'base to case' short is much higher than for the other two electrodes.