Ed Price wrote:

We were talking about repair and service equipment, not consumer items. A
consumer item is expected to have a short life-cycle, and repairability is
often not a concern.

If you cannot see the relationship, then you need to stretch a bit.

Everything in electronics, test equipment especially has grown in
complexity and performance, as it has been reduced in size. Some of the
reductions are there to make it possible to fit more test equipment in a
given space, and some are there because of necessities of the new
technology (eg. microwave speeds and low power consumption are better
done with tiny sized components.)


I never saw "multi-six-foot-rack analyzers"; the oldest & biggest I can
recall were Singer FIM analyzers, which were about 24" wide by 30" tall and
deep, and took four guys to move them (and the plug-in RF heads were a
one-man lift!). OTOH, everything inside was reachable and easily repairable.

Was your life, as a technician that is, made better or worse when that
same 4 man lift SA was reduced to one that you could carry yourself with
one hand, while carrying your 1G scope with the other?

How about performance? Did it help you to have the bandwidth limit of
your old 4 man lift SA rise from 1GHz to 300GHz? How about your 30MHz
scope that is now 1GHz? Did you notice that the prices went DOWN?

How about the heat generation? Have you ever worked in a lab that had
no effective air conditioning, and also had a herd of Tek 500 series
scopes whirring away?.. in the middle of the summer? I have, and I am
quite happy not to do it anymore. We saw temperatures as high as 120F
at times. No windows, one door, lots of fans. Turn off the equipment,
and the AC did quite fine.

And finally, how about the space savings? Does it help you or hurt you
to recapture that floor space the old SA, and scope, and signal
generator used?

Tiny little custom component ridden hard to service test equipment made
it possible to move away from that kind of scene.


If that 100 MHz scope can be built to have a reasonable cost to lifetime
ratio, then it could be considered a consumer item, and a non-repairable
investment. But to me, if I have to pay $10k or more for a piece of test
equipment, it had better last quite a few years and allow me to do
re-calibration and even moderately severe repair.

All of the $10K+ stuff I have seen from HP or Tek would easily meet your
needs. Calibration? You cannot be serious. Most of this stuff is so
finely calibrated that it would be beyond the capabilities of anything
but an expert calibration lab to accomplish the task. Just having the
standards necessary takes a whole lab... and a whole budget. I know
this because I tried to set up a NIST traceable cal lab for my business,
and eventually concluded that for me to do that, cal would have to
become my exclusive business. I still have all the standards and
equipment, but no time to put them to use... No money to keep them in
cert with NIST. It is FAR cheaper to send the stuff out and get it
calibrated.

The "consumer grade" goodies in the test equipment market don't
really need more than a simple calibration checking. I cannot tell
you the last time my little Fluke DVM needed recalibration... Because it
is 15 years old, and it has NEVER needed recalibration. Has something
to do with the little fidgety custom components that are inside it.
Same goes for my Tek 2465 scope.

-Chuck