Has anyone here tried using Schottky transistors for making HF oscillators or even a regenerative detector?
I'm curious because (1) I've never used them, and (2) they seem to have much lower voltage drops than silicon transistors (0.25V vs. 0.60V). So they might be useful for very-low-voltage operation. I've already got a superhet working off of 1.2V... it would be interesting to go even lower.
I had a pack of Schottky diodes, however I can't find them. I can take one from an old wall power supply.
I will maybe try at some stage more out of an interest in the grid detection possibility. Which you would recognize by a decrease in drain current with input signal strength. At the moment I'm taking a break and only slightly tinkering with the signal digger regen circuit, not anything else.
Me, three times. I buy them in bulk.
I would expect any germanium transistor to work equally well on low voltages, the base voltage conduction point is also a few hundred millivolts. Getting one that works these days might be a mission, they slowly become more leaky over time. They also are quite temperature sensitive. Im not sure they still even manufacture them?
After doing some more reading, it seems that what would be needed for low-voltage operation would be a so-called "Schottky Junction Transistor", as described here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060911212052id_/http://www.fulton.asu.edu/~thornton/Resume/Papers/00954487.pdf . A "Schottky Transistor" is apparently just a normal BJT plus a Schottky diode to divert excess base current and prevent saturation, to allow faster switching. But on the other hand, a "Schottky Junction Transistor" apparently uses a Schottky gate and so can operate at lower voltages. The above-linked paper says that a "Schottky Junction Transistor" could still operate at a low supply voltage of less than 0.5V.
However, it seems that "Schottky Junction Transistors" aren't a normal component that you can just buy off-the-shelf, as the only references I've found to them seem to be in research papers.