I loathe RS Components !

Was that before or rather after they crawled into bed with the handy dandy leather hobbiest outfit, Tandy, when Chicago's Allied Radio was king of the electronic components catalogs?

With a good proportion of the catalogue being actual replacement components for radios and tv's.

We had the opposite experience in the early 80's.

I'd been in business for about 6 years, and received big job from a customer who was reliable, but could be a little slow in paying. On an order that size there could be cash flow problems.

I discussed the problem with the RS rep, who got his account manager involved. They looked at our books and came back agreeing to allow us extended credit, (over 90 days), provided I kept them informed about what was happening.

Over the next year we did have a few cash flow events, but not a sqawk from Radiospares. Couldn't have done the job without them, and have used them ever since.

Yes, but they USED to hide the provenance of many of their lines- ICs in particular. Then we discovered that the PCB cleaner (it would probably have been something awful then, polytetrahydrofluorochloronitrophenyl benzoic acid or something) removed the paint, revealing the true part number underneath.

They also did a line in expensive strain gauge amplifiers, which we used until someone blew one up. Opening it up, we found a 741 inside...

Paul Burke

Maybe somebody should start up a transformer factory.

Good Luck! Rich

transformers

bloody

remotes

increases

the

"ratchet"

catalog

now USD

I guess you learnt your lesson.

If youre only doing a small volume short run, 2 suppliers may be considered adequate on a couple of parts, and putting 2 diffrent sets of pads on the pcb can enable use of other TFs if needed.

As for RS, dont think I've ever bought from them. Lots of data, thorough tech specs, but one look at the prices and the show's over. They make no attempt at competition.

NT

Pardon my ignorance:

Is New Zeeland entirely cleansed of electronics suppliers? Someone like "Toko" or "Panasonic" should be closer to home, no?

In France, they are called Radiospares as of today. My choice of parts suppliers ("prototype" work) has reduced to essentially them and Farnell. 1.5-2 years ago there was still a small shop in the town down here where a slightly bizarre gentleman was offering a selection of popular parts - very useful in case of saturday morning sudden shortage of LM317 or such, but now it's all gone...

"Frithiof Andreas Jensen" wrote in news:d2u4sh$is1$ snipped-for-privacy@newstree.wise.edt.ericsson.se:

More or less. In the "good old days", when there were 5 or 6 colour television factories in Auckland (a ridiculous situation for a country which then had a population of less than 2 million people, caused by the strict import controls of the time) there were dozens of component suppliers warehousing locally). They have all gone. We do have all the majors here (Arrow, Memec, Avnet etc), but they are merely sales reps for Australian/South East Asian warehouses. As long as one can meet the MOQs (sometimes a tube of semis, sometimes 1000s) then we are reasonably well served, but the situation is fairly dire for transformers as our long established makers stick to the high volume stuff like fluro ballasts. We do not have the equivalent of Mouser/Digikey and while we can import from them, the postage can get nasty. Hence we are stuck with RS and Farnell. Example : RS charge $19.50 for an AT89C2051 (25 up), but bought from the REAL distys I pay less than $3 in similar quantities. Unfortunately with transformers I do not have that choice. M

Indeed. It still had toobs in it IIRC ! Of course they're back in there now again too, at least they are in Farnell's catalogue. :-)

Graham

What is annoying though, is that in their desire to spread into other fields, they have to a large extent lost track of their origins. The range of electronic parts seems to shrink in each catalogue, instead of expanding as it used to do, and the features that made them useful to the design engineer (most parts available, data sheets available for most components, when a part existed, the 'support' parts for it were also stocked, and keeping fairly 'up to date' with new developments), have largely disappeared... :-(

Best Wishes

I read in sci.electronics.design that Mike Diack wrote (in ) about 'I loathe RS Components !', on Tue, 5 Apr 2005:

Buy a coil winder on Ebay and make your fortune.

I think "their game" is more to profit from engineers desparate need to shortcut the purchasing department when building prototypes - you must know the drill: You can only draw from a list of Authorised Devices, but to get them Autorised you will need to test them and write long declarations on why you cannot use any of the Authorised items, but to do *that*, you need to Order Some Unorthorized stuff to test.

All this, while sensible enough, is irrelevant to both Managers and the Salespeople who forget to put the QA procedures, which they always rant about in the brochures, in the schedule ...

RS might be feeling pressure: some of the big distributers have wisened up and just a phone call will get you the bits.

Hmmm - Maybe I should go and set up a Transformer Shop in NZ for my early retirement ;-)

Or to get the oportunity explore the unique landscape - which one has only seen on DVD.

Transformers are simple, undemanding, devices not stress-inducing and annoying work like the bastard IPv6 software I do now.

Have you tried transformer manufacturers? There's a couple in Auckland and Christchurch I have used, and I'm sure there's others as well. Not that cheap compared with Jameco and Digikey and the like, but I'm sure they would be cheaper than RS.

Barry Lennox