Having a 6.5 digit volt/current meter + super-wide range 4-quadrant source with ~0.02% accuracy in one LXI-compliant instrument is pretty cool.
Maybe Rigol will make one that isn't quite as fancy for a couple thousand $.
Even if it was restricted to +/-50V +/-100nA to +/-1A FS...
--sp
-- Best regards, Spehro Pefhany Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition: http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8 Microchip link for 2015 Masters in Phoenix: http://tinyurl.com/l7g2k48
Our new universal test set is an SMU, a DVM, a scope, a counter, and a zillion (well, 255) DPDT relays.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
I used to have an HP 4145B Semiconductor Parameter Analyzer which was like that, but not as beefy. It had four separate SMUs in it, though.
Sure thing--you have actual products.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
Too many. Over the years, we accumulate an increasing heap of products that have to be supported, test sets based on stuff you can't buy any more, old DOS computers and programs, all that. Lots of companies just terminate support on older products, but we try to not do that. My new test set should allow us to bring a lot of older products up to modern test standards, Linux and Python and mostly Ethertnet interfaces.
Testing is a big deal. It is about the only part of a company that grows linearly with sales.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Build more expensive stuff!
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
How do you get these old boatanchors repaired when they break? I used to have a bunch of HP and Tek equipment. One by one, they died. It was impossible to get them fixed. Tucker wanted a fortune, and shipping costs were prohibitive.
I now design my own equipment. The technology has advanced considerably since the boatanchors were built. You can get significantly improved performance for a fraction of the cost, and far greater flexibility. You can buy off-the-shelf equipment for some things, and wrap your own hardware and software around it to complete the job. Minicircuits has a wealth of inexpensive microwave stuff that makes design and build easy.
If it breaks, you don't have to send it to someone else to fix.
Entire systems are now available on a chip. For example, the TI THS788 is a 4 channel 13 ps single shot time interval counter. It beats the HP
5370B and SR620 for resolution and is available for as little as $153:Ever try to modify a HP or Tek instrument to make it do something different? If you want to add something to change or improve the performance of your own equipment, there is nothing stopping you.
About the only thing that hasn't improved much is microwave hardware. Under 10GHz is not too bad, but higher frequencies really cost way too much.
I haven't had many problems, but apart from swapping boards from a parts mu le, I probably wouldn't try very seriously to repair them. I did pull the r elay boards out of a couple of 3325As for cleaning, which restored them 100 %.
I've only had to chuck out one of them, an 85662A spectrum analyzer display . Oh, and a 6110A 3kV precision supply whose mains transformer was arcing. I got another one for $75. Life in the boat anchor world is great--my 8566B paid for itself in an afternoon.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
My experience is the opposite. I had a fairly large lab that I bought new
- HP spectrum analyzers, 8505 network analyzer, 5370B time interval, tek scopes - 7104, 7904, 7854, 2465, 2467B. One by one, I watched them die. I only have the 8566A, 3456A and 53310A still working. But I can't use the
53310A. The power transformer generates such a powerful external field that it ruins the rubidium lab reference clock.The 2467B's died when the battery backed ram ran out. The 7104's, 7904, and 7854 all quit. The 2465's died when some internal connector developed an intermittent connection. The scope trace would jump when you tried to touch the scope bnc connectors. They all did it.
I think any boatanchor you can reasonably afford to buy is at the end of its life, and it's just a matter of time until you have to throw it away. They are impossible to get repaired.
The problem is you don't know when this will happen, so you can't depend on having the instrument available when you need it.
On the other hand, if you develop your lab on a modular basis, you can quickly reconfigure it to make any measurement needed. You don't have to follow the HP and Tek philosophy of duplicating essential sections for each different instrument. No need for separate displays when everything goes to the PC. You can have separate wideband synthesizers that are used wherever needed. The lab is much smaller and lighter, and consumes much less power so there is no need for noisy fans. Plus you gain the benefit of decades of advances in technology that result in improved performance.
And yuou can fix it if it breaks!
Do you want to sell any of your broken stuff?
Over the past 6 or 7 years that I've been out on my own, I've acquired way over a million bucks' worth of classic gear (list price) for two or three c ents on the dollar. Many of the units are old friends, i.e. similar to ones IBM or Stanford bought for my use in the 80s to the late '00s. Overall, it 's paid for itself several times over.
You aren't going to convince me that that's a bad deal.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Sure - as long as it keeps working.
You know that's not going to happen.
On Fri, 27 Nov 2015 20:10:46 -0800 (PST), Phil Hobbs Gave us:
Bought two of these the other day to tune antenna designs with.
Paid far less and they are in better shape.
VERY handy items.
On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 04:26:58 GMT, Bruce S Gave us:
Yeah, and Yellowstone is long overdue for another Human race extincting eruption.
Might be in my lifetime... might be several tens of generations from now. The Earth might be chilled enough that it will never happen again. But it likely has one more belch left in it. Maybe that is what the guy (John) who wrote Revelation saw.
I don't think Yellowstone is up to driving the human race to extinction.
It's probably up to causing a population crash in North America, but advanc ed industrial civilisation in the rest of the world would probably survive, after a fashion.
The most recent similar eruption was in New Zealand 27,000 years ago (befor e the end of the last ice age) and it didn't wipe out the Australian aborig ines next door.
Unlikely.
Most likely a lot more than one. We haven't had a repeat the Siberian Traps (250 million years ago) - the more recent Deccan Traps (66 million years a go) at about half million cubic kilometres of lava flow were quite a lot sm aller, though still a lot bigger than the one thousand cubic kilometres inv olved in the last Yellowstone eruption.
Probably not.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
It doesn't have to keep working: "... it's [already] paid for itself several times over."
Most, if not all of the new equipment is non-repairable by the customer. There are no service documents available and nobody at the company will give any info for you to make repairs. After it goes out of support it's just junk.
It's all been pretty well bulletproof so far. You sound like you're a lot harder on equipment than I am. Maybe you and R. Baer should start a support group. ;)
Ebay is amazing.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
When I saw the topic, I expected a discussion about the "bang up job" (literally) their vendors do selling AoE3. That book weighs 5 pounds. Well...
I had to send my first one back; it was so damaged (bashed in corners, spine). The vendors cut costs, just slipping the book in a lightly padded envelope.
The second shipment wasn't much better, but just OK to keep.
To Anybody about to order a heavy book (like AoE) on Amazon: ask about their shipping methods first! (unless you don't care about the condition).
The first copy I got was also under-printed (poor contrast), like it was from a test run. Hmmmm.....
(I already alerted Win Hill about all this).
Rich S.
How do you know that? I've got a trusty old Trygon bench power supply,
0-30V, metered V and A, that has a lot of 196x datecodes. The neon power indicator is dim, and I had to replace a diode last year, but for 'keeps working' character, it has an enviable historic record.I'm seeing symptoms here - you might have new paint disease!
Nah. I treat my equipment very well. After all, I paid a fortune for it.
They just died before my eyes.
There might be a selection process going on. If you buy a piece of equipment that is 20 or 30 years old and it's still working, you may have bypassed part of the population with early end-of-life failures.
If you buy new, you have the entire population. So the issue is to guess what percentage of the population will fail in 20 or 30 years. From my experience, I guess it's pretty high. There is no way to tell, so it's a gamble.
But if you buy used, you have eliminated a lot of the risk.
The only problem is you have to wait 20 or 30 years to find out.
Meanwhile the technology improves. YIG oscillator phase noise improves by
20 dB. Time interval measurements improve and the cost drops by a factor of 10. ADC speed and resolution improve. Op amp bandwidth and phase noise improve. Microcontrollers become smaller, cheaper and more powerful. Microwave components up to 10GHz are cheap and readily available. Full- color displays are available and cheap.You can now put together an instrument with dramatically improved performance at very low cost and development time. And you can continually improve it as the technology advances.
That is virtually impossible to do with ancient technology equipment.
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