I was browsing through Mouser's newly gigantic catalog at lunch and happened onto a couple of things that I would not have noticed if I had to go look for them on the internet site. That slapped me in the face with why Mouser and others will still send me a four pound printed catalog four times a year. It's the fact that people see things they would not have otherwise have noticed.
In this particular case it was Supertex' high voltage TO-92 MOSFETs. Those of you who take the trouble to read GEO will have noticed my MOSFET Follies article, the gist of which was that there are certain places in tube amps where you can profitably and in good tone sub in a high voltage MOSFET for a triode section, freeing up the triode, or just giving you better performance.
I was using IRF820s, which are TO-220 devices. But Supertex grabbed me with their TO-92 devices. They have Pchannel up to 550V and N channel up to 600V, and dissipations of about a watt. If you want to replace a 12AX7 Follower with one of these, you can drop in one of the N channel devices. What's different here is that the gate capacitance on some of them is down in the 40-100pF range, not over 1nF. That means that you could start using them for non-follower apps, because a 62k ohm 12AX7 plate will give you a rolloff above audio with that kind of capcitance. So you might make a very linear phase inverter with a couple of these. And I'm sure they'll work for the stock Fender tremolo circuits, which see in another part of GEO.
That's just the enhancement mode devices. They also make depletion mode high voltage devices. That's right, they bias in the same manner as a triode. In spite of my preaching that a FET is not a tube and that replacing tubes with FETs one for one is not going to give you a tube sounding amp, lots of people seem to like this. So go get 'em. The Supertex depletion mode devices will bias up in a triode fashion, although you may have to diddle the source resistor value to get the right bias point.
All this because the catalog was paper...
Mouser's catalog is so HUGE that it's almost overwhelming at times however, like R.G. says, there lots more to be found in the paper catalog and it also doubles as a doorstop! :icon_lol:
great post RG!
i noticed the same thing a few weeks ago, I picked up a few musclecar and lowrider magazines, and I realized how fun it is to sit and actually flip pages and look at glossy photos on nice paper. I am on a pretty fast Mac , but still , waiting for a photo to load is WAY slower than turning a page in a magazine, and when i get to that page I have the equivalent of two really nice screens with two, three or 5 really nice images.
same thing with catalogs, maybe I'm an oldtimer but I think i can find most things faster in a paper catalog.
I've made a few Mouser impulse buys from the catalog :)
I can think of no better use for a rain forest!
I love the thing, but I do wish they'd make us ask for it. I use mine a few times a week lately, but for my purposes I'm just as happy with last October's issue. I've had one still in the shrinkwrap when the next one arrived.
There is another reason to still have the paper version. While I love the use of search engines there are still only as good as the data that is entered into them. Often different data entry agents will make decisions on the fly as to how and what information is to be put in the database. If the decisions are not consistent then the search engine cannot work at full effectiveness. Also if the structure of the database is change if the previous data enter is not reformatted to the new structure this can cause problems.
An example would be a search I did recently. I knew of some common parts that should work but I wanted to see if there were other options I didn't know about. I entered my search criteria and while I got some results I did not get the common parts amongst the results that I expected. I did a search for the specific parts and notice that some of the criteria I was looking for was inputed into the description field and not the parameter field. Since the parts I knew of we common and have been around for a long time I would guess that those parts were entered back when the database was simpler. When the database got expanded they did not port the parameters to their new dedicated fields hence my searches did not bring those parts up.
Of course there is the perusing of the book just to see what new toys there are to play with. :)
Andrew
Quote from: Ge_Whiz on March 03, 2007, 08:01:10 PM
I can think of no better use for a rain forest!
:-*
Yeah, I just went to their site and unsubscibed to the paper catalog, you go to "my account" and theres an unsubscribe thing on the right. Though a company in the 21st century is clueless not to ask before sending out tens of thousands of four pound catalogs that'll pobably go straight to the recycling bin 60% of the time.
Instead of the catalog maybe they could automaticaly present some new products that would come up when you logged in or browsed based on what individuals with accounts had bought previously. Kind of like at the grocery store (with the discount cards) when they print coupons on your receipt that are creepily in keeping with the type stuff you buy. RG, for instance, might be looking at PICs or something, and they would remember he'd bought MOSFETS a couple months before, so then their computer could throw a link or two up for new or interesting stuff in areas they know you're keen on...
It's pretty hard to get a paper catalog from Digikey, if you are in Australia.
Buying $900 worth of parts and saying 'please' doesn't help - I tried that :icon_mad:
I much prefer recieving a "CD" catalog !!
QuoteI can think of no better use for a rain forest!
Just to keep this discussion factual; paper, especially paper for catalogs and such, is made primarily from fast growing pine and other softwood trees, especially in the USA. The trees are replanted and regrown in many cases. Rain forest trees are often exotic hardwoods, and are far too valuable to make into paper.
QuoteThe trees are replanted and regrown in many cases.
That's mandatory for lumber companies. It works. There are now more trees in the USA than 100 years ago. And, the eastern hardwood forests are slowly recovering from the worst ecological disaster they've ever seen- the chestnut blight. Other hardwoods are 'filling in' the niche once occupied by American Chestnut.
I have 3 of the few American Chestnut trees left. Sadly, they have the blight. No cure, no way to protect them.
Quote from: R.G. on March 04, 2007, 08:49:18 AM
QuoteI can think of no better use for a rain forest!
Just to keep this discussion factual; paper, especially paper for catalogs and such, is made primarily from fast growing pine and other softwood trees, especially in the USA. The trees are replanted and regrown in many cases. Rain forest trees are often exotic hardwoods, and are far too valuable to make into paper.
And much of the paper used in catalogs is recycled - from other catalogs. :icon_mrgreen:
But where do all the Polar Bears go??
zoo
Fair enough, best place for them. Pass the catalogue darling...
I order some IC's on-line from Mouser a couple of weeks ago. I wanted TL072's @ TL074's I missed the suffix by one character and received surface mount devices instead of the dip packages that I needed. Anyone interested in some SMT IC's just email me and I'll send them out free.
They work great as a child's booster seat in a crunch also.
A mouser and a digikey will get you about 7 inches.
In my line of work, mechanical engineering, I always prefer a hardcopy catalog over an e-catalog. Same with electronics stuff.
The convenience factor is huge. Being able to scan pages looking for the right capacitors is much faster then searching online. Sometimes I don't know what I want until I see it, so page-surfing is a great help to me.
And then it sits in the outhouse for the next year. :icon_mrgreen:
You can't beat a 60 pound Unix manual for killing a bug... like a %^&*roach! ;D
I take mine to work with me (I work alone in the field) and browse it while at lunch. No better way to be left alone than to whip a big technical looking catalog out while you're eating your chicken fingers at Ruby Tuesday. That or the RCA tube receiving manual. A waitress asked me "Whatcha readin" once. Once.
For my money, huge parts catalogs make some of the best reading. I gave up on fiction several decades ago, because I found I was able to exercise my imagination more with a parts catalog. But that's me. When I was 12, one of my friends had a "hip" father, and Playboy could be found in their bathroom. These days, I think my eyes would light up more to stroll into someone's john and find a Digikey and Mouser catalog for my reading pleasure.
The downside:
- As the number of available products increases, the catalog becomes larger and more places discontinue them because posted PDF versions are cheaper and easier to get to potential clients. It's not just the printing but the postage costs as well. I imagine that somewhere there are databases that allow companies to determine who buys enough stuff on an annual basis to justify sending them a catalog. For the most part, my sense is that companies are not that discriminating, so they reason through whether the catalog ought to be published in terms of net return on investment when 800-page monsters are shipped out indiscriminately to anyone who has bought stuff in the last 6 months or so. I couldn't tell you who, but I would imagine that somewhere some companies make you pay for the catalog up front,and will rebate you the cost of the catalog off of subsequent purchases, which seems to me to be a reasonable and fairway to do it.
- To keep printing costs as low as possible, the print gets ever smaller, much like the phonebook. Generally, you need to have a magnifying glass to read them, which is a bit of a strain on the eye. I'm wondering if it might not be more practical and helpful to all involved if a more barebones catalog (minus all those specs) was produced in print, and came with a CD or even DVD with the more detailed information that could be easily enlarged on the screen. A lot of the time, all I relly want from the catalog is a price and availability list; i.e., we carry THESE op-amps and we want this much for them if you buy under 25 and this much if you buy more than 25. This way you get the best of both worlds; the ability to sift through and let serendipity do its thing, and the ability to afford to provide that service to people at manageable cost.
Thanks for the info about changing or deleting your subscription. I was wondering why they kept sending me a huge paper catalog every 3 months. Changed it to CDROM; problem solv-ed. :)
Quote from: JonFrum on March 04, 2007, 11:57:49 AM
Quote from: R.G. on March 04, 2007, 08:49:18 AM
QuoteI can think of no better use for a rain forest!
Just to keep this discussion factual; paper, especially paper for catalogs and such, is made primarily from fast growing pine and other softwood trees, especially in the USA. The trees are replanted and regrown in many cases. Rain forest trees are often exotic hardwoods, and are far too valuable to make into paper.
And much of the paper used in catalogs is recycled - from other catalogs. :icon_mrgreen:
In the papermill I worked summers to pay my way through college, the majority of the paper to be recycled came from porno magazines.
True story.
--john
when I was first getting in to electronics the mouser catalog is what taught me about the different types of parts such as axial vs radial etc etc. lol every beginner should look through the entire book. :icon_eek:
Warm regards,
Chris Brown
A paper catalog is often better for me than being in the STORE....where I'm overwhelmed...sidetracked...and forget important things. But...having done homework...and walking in w/a dog-eared-parts-circled-catalog as my list = problem solved.
I know a guy who heats his house with a combination of junk mail (wood/coal stove) and used deep-frying oil(oil furnace). He loves my old Mouser catalogs!
Quote from: Meanderthal on March 05, 2007, 08:24:09 PM
I know a guy who heats his house with ... used deep-frying oil(oil furnace).
Sorry for the OT, but does it smell bad? I've cleaned out enough fryers to know that stuff isn't usually that fragrant.
The Rapid catalogue in the UK this year is HUGE. I noticed things in it that I'd never have seen online and didn't realise I needed!!!!! Much easier to see what caps etc you're buying than online and it helps that they are all together, you'd miss so much with just a search on the 'net. It's free as well unlike the Maplin one.
RG, I did the same thing a few weeks ago, was browsing through the Mouser catalog and found the Supertex depletion mode 500v MOSFET's, and bought a few. Haven't had a chance to play with them yet though. You have to love Mouser as they have all that cool stuff at great prices, yet still no minimum order. They and McMaster-Carr may be the only large scale vendors with such policies. Speaking of McMaster Carr, you seen their catalog? A mere 4 inches thick...
QuoteSorry for the OT, but does it smell bad? I've cleaned out enough fryers to know that stuff isn't usually that fragrant.
No, not at all. It smells like french fries outside his house! Seriously.
Now, the oil itself stinks... he uses 55 gallon drums, hand pumps it through 3 filters, then into the tank it goes. Messy, and there's sludge for the landfill. But, it works better than when he tried used motor oil.
And, he saves a bundle of cash. I'd do the same, but my house is 4 star electric, with mucho insulation, and a heat pump. No furnace.
Quote from: col on March 06, 2007, 02:48:31 PM
It's free as well unlike the Maplin one.
Ah, NOW I know why the Maplin on-line catalog is so crap - they are trying to force you to buy the paper one! :icon_mad: