yet another zener diode question

[pinkjimiphoton]

hahah i'm just making popcorn and trying to be quiet so maybe i can learn something, antonis, its all good bro

[TejfolvonDanone]

For reference I'm not talking complete nonsense:
http://www.surgecomponents.com/admin/pdfs/BZX55C0V8-BZX55C75.pdf?c=1 Last page note 2.

Never said you're talking nonsense.. 

What puzzled me was the "conventional" cathode mark for a Zener and it's actual connection to the negative pole..


To "spam" a little more the OP..
(sorry Jim..)

I just like to get my facts right and I tend to make no sense when I'm tired.

Story time (just to further hijack the topic):
I tried to make a tubescreamer type overdrive with just one low voltage Zener and it took me ages to find out why was the signal only clipping in one side when i used the BZX55C0,8. I'd set up a little measuring circuit to measure where it breaks down actually with a 50V power supply, a current limiting resistor and a DMM. Turned out the RBDV was about 20V on one and higher than 50V on the other. Then I went on a googling session and found a datasheet with that little note on it.

That's why kids you should always read the datasheet carefully and for the exact component you use not just for the series.
*closes book and puts a blanket over you and silently walks out of the room switching the lights off on the way*

[antonis]

No reason to doubt your story or validated results, Szabolcks.. 

My breef story consists of placing one BZX55C0.8 in a hard-clipping ciruit (signal axis to GND) after an octave-clean blend pot and right before a BJT recovery amp with "incorporated" Bass/Treble adj with excellent results..
(maybe my ear can't discriminate the difference between symmetrical and asymmetricall clipping so I never proceeded to further waveform or diode testing..)

<Playing upon Jim's long popcorn making span..>

[pinkjimiphoton]

i've used just one diode in one spot, and an anti parallel in another in a couple fuzzes with some really cool results too.

damn, this popcorn has almost too much butter lol

[anotherjim]

The way I read it, that 0.8v part IS a normal diode and is marked and used as such, same as you might use 1N4148 or a chain of them to make a voltage reference for a comparator or BBD bias.

Top of page 2 of that BZX55c data shows conduction curves for them. Proper zener types have an obvious and useful looking knee in zener operation. Forward knee of C0.8 is invisible at the scale drawn.