Bad Omen?

factor of 2, with most of them being on par or better.

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Eh, if I need a million of 0.1uF ceramic capacitors I simply send an email to all my vendors and let them compete...

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The only dual FETs I am aware of (I mean that are left) are RF transistors. But it's MOSFETs. And even then you often down know how they track because most are multi-chip, meaning just two devices in one package, hoping that they come from the same area on the same wafer. Even then tracking won't be good.

I've had that issue with 2x45 degree phase shifters in late 80s when helping another team. Had told them not to use direct conversion but ...

Anyhow, we paid through the nose for 0.5% film caps.

factor of 2, with most of them being on par or better.

markup is

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On my projects there usually isn't time for that. And this was just an example. It's even worse for specialty stuff such as RF caps that are high voltage. Without Digikey that would take forever. Like it did in the early 90's.

On my designs there are typically between 50 and several hundred different discrete parts.

a factor of 2, with most of them being on par or better.

markup is

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I agree there are some reasons why people stay with them. They would've ran out of business if there were none :)

But in my case there is nothing that would've justified paying a higher price for the same parts. I do even purchase from them on those rare occasions they have something in stock that nobody else does but that is extremely rare...

a factor of 2, with most of them being on par or better.

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I and my clients only purchase prototype quantities there. IME they are mostly too expensive for larger production runs. On prototypes, however, only time matters. Cost really doesn't.

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There is LSK389 dual monolythic JFET from Linear Systems that is supposed to be a copy of Toshiba 2SK389 but they are not widely available. It is kinda boutique part. And they did not copy the 2SK389 p-channel twin, 2SJ109 :(

So for the current production (since not so long ago) the only ones are single 2SK170/2SJ74 from Toshiba. They are TO-92 only... The better n-channel one, 2SK369 (it has twice the Yfs of 2SK170) unfortunately is not accompanied with a p-channel complement :(

For quality audio one should only use polystyrene or at least polypropylene capacitors so it is not just _film_ ones :) Russian surplus is not all that expensive but it is not easy to get and the supply is finite; they don't make them any more :( I'm paying something like $0.2-$0.35 when buying in bulk through my russian buddies close to those military warehouses.

A thinfilm surface-mount resistor, Susumu or KOA maybe, should be indistinguishable from an RN55. Same Johnson noise, same (none!) shot noise.

John

Eh, this is not _THAT_ simple... If you look at CMF/RN datasheet, you'll notice that they explicitely tell about noise and voltage coefficient. I haven't seen any other resistor datasheet that had any mention to those two parameters.

Ideal resistor is all Johnson noise. But there is no such thing as ideal resistor and all of them have additional noise, usually voltage dependent. Of all resistors CMF/RN are the only ones that have any mention of this.

The other thing is voltage coefficient. Real resistor are not 100% linear and again CMF/RN is only one that explicitely provides this parameter.

And finally, even though I'm not targeting audiofools, people get very suspicios seeing those tiny SMD resistors instead of gold standard RNs :)

than a factor of 2, with most of them being on par or better.

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Yes, that's true. I also used to buy prototype parts from DigiKey. Then it shifted to DigiKey _and_ Mouser because the latter started having parts the former didn't have in stock or at all. Then it became Mouser and Digikey because Mouser almost always had most of the parts I needed and they were cheaper. Not a big deal for prototyping for mass production but quite significant for a business of one as I am. Now it is Arrow, Avnet, Quest, Mouser in that order, ocassionally Onlinecomponents, Allied, Newark, Future, America II, and extremely rarely DigiKey. I only buy from them if nobody else have something they have that is almost as rare as being striken by lightning four times in a row in one day...

They used to have that database of the products they carry for OrCAD (I don't know if they still have something like this) but it was absolutely useless for me because I do not use OrCAD and even if I did it didn't have anything but their part no. and price -- no schematic symbols, no footprints, nothing.

This tends to be even slower than Farnell:

I believe he's referring to a Firefox add-on:

factor of 2, with most of them being on par or better.

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I use this with Firefox.

Note that it has to load the pages first, so if you have scores of pages it might take a moment or two each time you search, even with a fast internet connection, but all-in-all it's a good thing. I generally leave it turned on all the time.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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You audio guys always want complement and stuff. "Yes, the appetizer was good. But the caviar was not Beluga."

Well, that just the trick, Russian buddies :-)

Back in the late 80s I had the minor Problem that the iron curtain hadn't fallen yet. Reagan asked Gorbachev a few times to knock it down but Gorbachev wasn't quite ready to get the sledgehammer out of the basement. An aggravating factor was that my knowledge of the Russian language consisted of the word na'sdarovje :-)

So we had to live with whatever material we could get. And that sure wasn't much to write home about.

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I spent six weeks working in Moscow, in the Breshnev days. I learned four words

spa-seeba thank you

dos-ve-don-ya bye

milinki tiny (as in "tiny capitalist)

klooch tool of some/any sort

It was interesting.

John

factor of 2, with most of them being on par or better.

markup is

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Mouser/Allied/Arrow/etc?)

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Thanks! Very intersting.

Does the last one sound like "kludge"?

Most of the Russian we heard in Germany was from returning POWs. Stuff like "dawai" (quick, let's get moving here!), "raboti" (work), "Rasberaitje pa piat" (line up in rows of five). Some of it made it into the language just like "cool" did, or "angst" over here.

According to Russian engineers I've worked with it is a country with a very deep cultural history, not just the well-known stuff such as the Bolshoi theatre or the choirs. Unfortunately now very messed up by organized crime and politicians, at least that's what they told me. If you want to design stuff or start a business with any chance of an ROI you have to leave :-(

Farnell supposedly wants to integrate theirs with Eagle. They took a pretty bold step in that direction in that they just bought the whole company (Cadsoft).

Or even a black SUV with tinted windows, or a bread truck with a license plate that says "exempt". ;-)

Cheers! Rich

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Sure, who wants a fake caviar? :)

There is another deficiency -- they only carry "GR" parts so if one needs them from higher Idss groups (BL, V) he's out of luck for now.

But anyways, this is a good start and I do really hope the rest of those will follow.

And BTW, 2SK369 is a wonderful JFET :)

Yep :) It is actually very interesting time right now (in its final days)--their military had at least a couple of spares per each and every part installed in their military equipment and now that equipment is going obsolete so they sell almost all their inventory of NOS parts. There is plenty of subminiature vacuum tubes (my another favorite :)) available for pennies on the dollar so I bought everything I could reach. The same is true with those high-tolerance polystyrene-foil capacitors and some of other useful ex-military stuff. They didn't make any decent consumer products but military electronics was top notch. It was extremely expensive back at their glory time and almost impossible to get but now it is on sale.

Unfortunately it is the final sale and when they gone they gone forever. Nobody makes anything like that and not going to. They are now in the same cheap chinese crapboat we all are.

They don't have anything worth writing home about any more... Back then at their socialistic heydays nobody even thought about military components price. The quality was paramount, each and every part was individually tested, and QA guys could easily fail the entire lot if they didn't like e.g. the paint color. There was no business relations between military and industry, everything was paid for by the government. That's why nobody cut corners trying to save on something. If it was told to be all gold, it was all gold.