A litany of dumbassery

Just did a layout with JFETs, and pretty sure 2N5457 and 2N5485 both use drain/source/gate order. The first datasheets I found agree:

(you can usually swap drain and source on JFETs but gate isn’t in the middle)

As long as you’re within the max specs, the most important properties for a JFET tends to be Vgs(off) aka Vp and Idss and the former is at least somewhat close (-0.5 to -4.0 V for the 2N5485 vs -0.5 to -6.0 V) while the latter differs more (4-10 mA vs 1-5 mA). Note that they’re not very precise devices, so if there’s no trimming procedure odds are the circuit is fine with either (or the designer just tested one, and you’re kind of screwed anyway).

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