Well, there's more circuitry going on on the board, that isn't connected to this except for GND.
I have to correct myself again :-/
I realized that actually the input has a DC offset, just not 12V but about 2V slowly going down to ~0.6V before turning off. The 1.5V ptp I measured before were noise on the ground line. I measured the difference between two channels of my scope this time.
I assume that the audio signal is modulated onto the 2V DC offset, but is so small that my cheapy scope couldn't display it. I also measured on the speaker directly and not surprisingly found pretty much the same thing (mabye a slight voltage difference due to the SCR).
I'll try measuring it again when someone's at the door so I can have an actual signal and not just noise. But it seems to me that if the signal's too small to see on the scope (1V/div) it should be too small to hear on the speaker? No idea how big a signal ought to be to produce a quite audible noise.
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- So the way I see it now, the button starts the SCR (trigger current 200uA)
- Once the SCR is open, the cap is charged via the A-G current
- The modulated audio signal is audible via the speaker
- If the signal for some reason falls below the cutoff current (5mA), the cap will discharge as G-C current and keep the SCR open
- The cap downstairs giving the DC offset to the audio signal discharged slowly, at some point falls below the cut-off current
- The cap in the diagram discharges via the SCR and audio output is stopped
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Remaining questions:
1) what's the 10k for (protecting the gate? as voltage divider with the 1k?)
2) what's the 1k for (discharging the cap in case of SCR fail?)
3) is the cap really necessary?
Thanks for all the help so far, and sorry for the confusion. I guess I'm more noob than I thought I'd be