Dave, I think you're right on the money with that observation. If the box retails at under $100 and obviously the retailer is still making a tidy profit, one can only guess what the factory price is before shipping and importing. Bugger all! Yes the product still has QA - it's called the Customer. :P
The OP should just return it for an exchange or refund. No one in their right mind would seriously consider repairing it as it would most likely cost more than the buy in price to do so. When it makes it back to tricky dickies it's most likely fate will to fall from a great height and become another stock loss / insurance claim.
Not just cheap instruments either. Back when I was servicing audio gear, it wasn't uncommon to have a brand-new CD player with an up-market brand name not function straight out of the box.... because a ribbon cable hadn't been plugged in. I recently bought a generic 512MB USB flash drive. Completely erratic operation which often made Windoze Explorer freeze. Final testing? What final testing? Let the customer see if it works.
Of course I can't say for certain that it wasn't already damaged, because I wasn't there. If I was there, I'd have brought it home in my car and none of this would have happened. But...
(1) The bloke who sent it me has been a mate for longer than you've been alive. He'd never do anything like that. He's willing to sign a Statutory Declaration that the CRO was working and was not damaged in any way before he posted it.
(2) The side the CRT was shattered on was facing the top of the case. To me it looked like that's the side the impact was on.
(3) There was absolutely no evidence that the CRO's metal case had impacted onto anything while outside its carton. No dents, deformation or anything, top or bottom (or anywhere else).
Standard moulded styrofoam, more than adequate to protect against
*reasonable* transportation shocks, I'd have thought.
In the light of what happened, obviously the packing wasn't sufficient to protect against what it was subjected to. The sender wasn't anticipating the kind of rough handling the carton received.
Yep, I sure ran out of luck. As you can see in the photos, the CRT has protective rubber mounting rings around it. Maybe the impact "waveform" which broke it was right at the glass's resonant frequency?
After this, I'm going to be too!! I'll only use Aust Post as an absolute last resort in future. I saw a posting on a newsgroup from someone who packed up some china plates really carefully, with each one wrapped in cloth. After Australia Post had transported them, most of the plates were broken. That person was as amazed as I was, at AP's ability to break things. I bet you didn't write "Fragile" on anything you sent, which seems to be an invitation to them to drop the article from as high above the floor as possible.
What annoys me more than the damage is the many-weeks-long beaurocratic run-around I got afterwards, and Aust Post's attitude of "No care and no responsibility taken". As a last resort, a couple of months ago I wrote to AP's NSW Manager about all this, as their website suggests. Never got a reply. Maybe the letter got broken in transit? :-)
Look in the instructions for the bit on adjusting the compensation... there's a small screw near the plug end of the probe cable. (it's on page 7, if you've lost it you can download a pdf from DSE)
The artwork shows vertical lines on the display, in real life there won't be any because the electron beam is being re-targeted too fast for enough electrons to hit the part between the upper and lower lines and light it up.
(aside to phil) The drawings in this manual are the same as the ones in the "digimess" 10Mhz scope manual on farnell's site, the schematic is similar to the one DSE sent me too.
Did they send you a bearly readable one, mine looks like it was a fax that was scanned by a monkey.
nah adjust on a square wave, even a badly malajusted probe will produce a perfect sine on the display if you feed one in at the tip. so testing with a sine is pointless.
What annoys me more than the damage is the many-weeks-long beaurocratic run-around I got afterwards, and Aust Post's attitude of "No care and no responsibility taken". As a last resort, a couple of months ago I wrote to AP's NSW Manager about all this, as their website suggests. Never got a reply. Maybe the letter got broken in transit? :-)
Bob
***Er,why didn't you take out the $2.50 option and register the thing for an agreed value?
Yep. It doesn't matter if they smashed a carton full of carefully-packed china or the CRT in an oscilloscope by dropping the box flat onto the floor from 6 metres up in the air, if there's no obvious external damage then clearly the contents were already smashed when posted and you're making a false claim. That's their attitude anyway.
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