I have old magazines that describe designs that still use germanium transistors, which are gone. I would like to set up some. Can I use equivalent silicon transistors?
There are some cases where general purpose silicon transistors can replace the old germanium transistors but there are not many and we need to be careful. The polarization of the germanium transistors is different from the silicon transistors. The transistors begin to conduct with 0.2 V while those of 0.7 V silicon which means completely different base resistors for both types. With some care or knowledge we can try changing the base resistors of the project using Multisim, for example, but this is tricky for projects that have many components.
