Useless UK component distributors

On a sunny day (Wed, 21 Aug 2013 18:32:29 +0100) it happened Peter wrote in :

ebay? I can anything I want in ebay land.

Except parts with a paper trail adequate to guard against counterfeits.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The reason that some of us use franchised distributors is traceability.

ISO, MIL, and all that.

Ebay doesn't cut it.

On a sunny day (Wed, 21 Aug 2013 14:10:04 -0400) it happened Phil Hobbs wrote in :

True, I had some (10?) counterfit MAX232. But it is rare, you learn who to trust. Papertrail no, well if you push it a bit, it seems China has anything and often the knowledge to help. Remember the iphones etc also come from there (China), somebodies PCBs... I have some very rare chips from ebay, really. Just got a new mouse (for laptop wireless)... cheap, battery included... There is no hope for local retail to match these prices. I have 74HC4040, 4046, whole lot of CMOS TTL series all from ebay ... On some of it: Philips date stamp 1993..... Hey that stands for quality!

On a sunny day (Wed, 21 Aug 2013 11:14:12 -0700) it happened Fred Abse wrote in :

I am not so sure, just specify: 'ebay' on the forms. People will change awareness. Do you think if you specify RS it wil be any better? Will be al ot mroe expensive though. All them missiles will be used only once anyways ;-)

RS used to get their parts from all - pretty much every other major UK distributor told you where your parts were coming from, but RS shipped whatever they could get their hands on.

I'd heard that they'd got better, but they were never my preferred supplier.

The big distributors here, like Avnet and Arrow, have pretty good FAEs. They call on us now and then, with a sales person, to see what we need. Some of the disty FAEs are specialists in, say, LTC or TI, and they often get us better support than the manufacturers do.

But we are a short drive from Silicon Valley, and we buy roughly $800K worth of parts per year, so we probably get better service than a smaller operation located somewhere else. We are not big enough to get decent support from Xilinx or Altera, and the distributors can't help us a lot there.

But still, we mostly research parts on our own, and do breadboards and characterization when there's any doubt.

You get "silly girls" because good engineers would rather be engineering than answering silly questions.

That stands for 30 years old, in my book ;-)

--------^^^^

I've got a few *stocks* I'd like you to check up on in that book, if you've got some free time. (also, be interested in the next few Super Bowl winners... :> )

That was a long time ago Bill... a SN7400 with no markings except the RS stock number.

Or you order 1000 resistors and they came in strips of 5, each strip individually wrapped in stupid little cellophane packets. (Actually that still happens a bit).

Ahh, the good old days...

These days, you order the MPQ of 1k pcs from Farnell, it comes in, badly packed in dribs and drabs over the next 2 weeks from their warehouses in various countries and Newark in the USA. They've lost one piece somewhere so it alone turns up 6 months later and you have no idea what it is at first.

On a sunny day (Wed, 21 Aug 2013 12:10:55 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Bill Sloman wrote in :

RS used to re-label some chips with an RS number :-) I have rubbed some of to find who really made it,,. This was in the early eighties. They stil ldo it?

On a sunny day (Wed, 21 Aug 2013 12:44:08 -0700) it happened Fred Abse wrote in :

But those 20 year old chips still work 20 years later, but do the chips of today still work 20 years from now?

So, print up the paperwork for the widgets one is selling to the Chinese...

Mainly because there is a lot of stolen stuff there.

Back then the larger computer manufacturers like ICL (remember them) had house codes on their chips. ISTR A=7400 etc.

Rapid Online have come a long way and are generally cheaper these days. All of them have search facilities that are like pulling teeth.

Why can't they understand that an engineer looking for a part wants to select by some rules like (Hfe > 200) & (Vce >50) & (Imax > 3A)

I do not want to click every box matching my requirements in a long ordered list for each search parameter that I want controlled.

Farnell is crap nowadays. I stopped buying from them totally a year or two ago.

John Devereux wrote

They are still useful for getting prototype parts next day, and for shortages. Free shipping still too.

You said Philips, I rest my case...

They aren't talking about Radio Shack.