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3 - Noise from pure germanium for ITC applications - by Andrès Ramos


Andres Ramos

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I made my first steps in ITC with the zincite receiver I made (Look at topic "1. Zincite as an replacement for germanium in ITC application"). My intention was to find a cheap and easy replacement for germanium since germanium semiconductors are becoming obsolete more and more. But there is also an application with pure germanium that was successfully tested earlier and is said to be a design of Thomas Alva Edison himself. See article here. I don't know if this is true but I wanted to find out if germanium would give me results comparable to the ones I gained with zincite.

Thus I bought a disk made of 98% pure germanium at Ebay and constructed a mechanical assembly that allowed me to place it between to electrodes with one of them to be adjustable with a screw.

Mechanical assembly of germanium disk holder

Assembly.jpg

Since operating the germanium was not different from working with zincite I just replaced the zincite sub assembly in my receiver by the one shown in the picture above.

VA_Zincite-6.jpg

 

Tests and results

Basically my presumptions were proven. Germanium gave the same quality and sound that i already was used to from zincite. The difference was just that germanium was more stable. I already expected this since germanium is a solid crystal structure and not as weak as zincite. So from a signal quality viewpoint the germanium circuit can easily replaced by zincite.

 

A collection of exported audio sounds can be found here.

 

 

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