Transistors

[Craig]

I had a good night messing about with PNP transistor jargon. I winded up with a method that seems to be working, so far as you don't expect miracles. Taking a graph base current of 50 microamps from ARRL and a collector current of 2 milliamps, I set out to simply calculate the Beta. Or add collector and base to get the emitter. I didn't quite follow ARRL's system so I looked online. All of this was for common emitter.
I know this is a bit dated and not accurate in real life but the fun is in going through the old school. I also had to learn to do Logs as well. I wonder if kids still do logs at school.
I expanded on Mark's hints as well so often work out voltage drops to get terminal voltages.

That is definitely a Ge transistor. Beta (=Ic/Ib) is only 40, which is typical of germanium. A half way decent silicon transistor will typically have a beta in the range 200 to 900.

You'll drive yourself bonkers trying to get to grips with an old reference trying to understand germanium. These things had a leakage current in the range 100 to 300 microamps, and it doubles for every six degrees temperature rise - and that temperature rise can be due to heating of the device because of the current flow! So setting the bias point is a real black art.

I applaud your fixation on understanding the roots of transistor operation from the 50's and 60's, but get a solid understanding of modern transistor operation and circuits around that first.