1-Transistor Radio With Diode | Project 6/10 | Maxitronix 10in1 | In The Lab With Jay Jay

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In this video I do the sixth Maxitronix 10in1 Electronic Project Lab project: 1-Transistor Radio With Diode.

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SUNSHINE Hard Brush SetThis is an image of the product.notes

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1-Transistor Radio | Project 5/10 | Maxitronix 10in1 | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video on this show’s homepage which is here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

In this video I do the fifth Maxitronix 10in1 Electronic Project Lab project: 1-Transistor Radio.

This is the second radio circuit and just like the previous radio circuit I wasn’t able to make this one work either! But at least this time I did get some static noise out of the circuit, which was better than the “nothing” which I got out of the previous circuit.

Also, I did learn how to setup a frequency measurement on my oscilloscope: Measure -> Add -> Freq. Easy peasy! :)

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Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Scotch Titanium ScissorsThis is an image of the product.notes

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Standard Aussie home television aerial RF coaxial connector

Man I had a lot of trouble figuring out what these things are called. I can tell you that they are not called F-Type, BNC, SMA, N-Type, or PL-259 connectors. In the I end I asked about this and learned these connectors are called Belling-Lee connectors, also known as IEC 169-2 Female/Male. But if you search for “IEC connector” (which these things are apparently sometimes called) you will only find the power adapters, not these aerial connectors.

New computer ‘trail’

I have built a new computer ‘trail‘ out of my old workstation ‘tradition‘. I was able to do this because I migrated the VirtualBox VMs that were running on ‘tradition’ over to QEMU/KVM VMs now running on ‘lore‘.

My new computer ‘trail’ is setup as the recording workstation for the “booth” in my studio. This is good because now I can record at 4K in the booth!

I don’t use Windows much these days but this new studio workstation runs Windows 11 Pro. I haven’t used software RAID on Windows before but for this workstation I setup a RAID1 mirror using 2x 2TB NVMe drives. I was able to configure the block size for the NTFS file system so I picked 2MB (which was the maximum) as this RAID array will only be for storing video recordings (which are huge files).

Oh cringe

Man. So. Today, this happened. I was watching a new video from Adrian Black and his EEVBlog multimeter failed:

It's disappointing that it's already failed

I have been saving my pennies and planning to buy an EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter because a lot of the makers around the interwebs have one as a nod to Dave Jones over on the EEVBlog, but that’s just so embarrassing that it’s failing. Of all the equipment you have you need to trust your test equipment the most and this is… well, just sad I guess.

Logic Analyzer with 1GHz Sampling Rate

Today I was pleased to discover this: DreamSourceLab DSLogic U3Pro32 USB-Based Logic Analyzer with 1GHz Sampling Rate, 2Gbits Memory, USB 3.0 Interface, 32 Channels.

There are some notes from the manufacturer over here: DSLogic Series USB-based Logic Analyzer.

It’s a logic analyzer which can operate at 1GHz that’s within my price range. I’m not rushing off to buy this thing, but it is certainly on my list.

The only other thing I have seen that compares to this logic analyzer is this RIGOL DS70304/DS70504– Digital Oscilloscope 3GHz/5GHz 4 Channel 20GSa/s 2Gpts 1000000 wfms/s which is roughly two orders of magnitude more expensive.

Diode Experiment | Project 3/10 | Maxitronix 10in1 | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video on this show’s homepage which is here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

In this video I do the third Maxitronix 10in1 Electronic Project Lab project: Diode Experiment.

When I looked at the resistor on the bottom I thought it was red – brown – black – gold which would have been 21Ω but I think I misread brown and that was actually purple which would be 27Ω which stacks better with the two measurements I made both of which said 27Ω.

In the video we examine the forward voltage of our germanium diode and get various readings. Typically a germanium diode should be around 0.3V versus silicon diodes which are usually around 0.7V.

The component testers we use are these:

On the FNIRSI component tester the Ir is the “reverse current”, also known as the “leakage current”. This is the small amount of current which flows through the diode when it is reverse biased (that is, basically, connected the wrong way around).

I asked ChatGPT a few questions about diodes and their specifications which you can read here: Germanium Diode Forward Voltage if you’re at all interested in such things. Of course you should be doubly suspicious of anything you read on the internet. :)

The really amazing learning for me in this experiment was how hot the germanium diode got versus the lamp, which was so surprising. Just goes to show how good an idea it is to actually do experiments and measure things! The thermal imager we used was the UNI-T UTi260B.

Also I think I’m coming around to the view that an oscilloscope is a pretty poor voltmeter. My oscilloscope is an MSO5074 70MHz 4 Channel MIXED SIGNAL OSCILLOSCOPE and I love it but I think in future I will limit my use of the oscilloscope to situations where I’m actually dealing with some sort of oscillator. I think simple digital multimeters would have been better test equipment to use for the kinds of readings I was trying to take in this experiment.

I hope you enjoy the video. Stay tuned for the upcoming projects. If you’re interested in seeing them don’t forget to subscribe!

Also, if you’re interested in getting any of these Maxitronix kits yourself the best place I know to look is on eBay. Let me know if you find them somewhere else!

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe!


Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

aToolTour Black Hexagon Deburring Drill BitThis is an image of the product.notes

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Propagation of electricity

Thanks to Craig for referring me to Brian Haidet’s AlphaPhoenix channel.

I found the following four videos on the AlphaPhoenix channel explaining various aspects of the propagation of electricity, which goes some way to explaining how the high impedance headphone might work in my 10in1 2/10 project.

While watching the videos I discovered that Brian’s oscilloscope is a Siglent SDS1104X-E (100 MHz) Oscilloscope, a pretty nice looking bit of kit!