Quite often it works, but sometimes it does not,
not to long time ego I had to investigate one non-linearity case with a
high mode QAM signal, there was something, what not supposed to be
there, the only spectrum analyzer which had enough dynamic range was one
from Rohde&Schwarz,
73
K6UHN
Alex
On 2/14/2016 11:20 AM, William H. Fite wrote:

Totally agree. Disposable and cheap. Plus the companies don't intend to
stay in business but get picked up by some larger company....
Still amazing for little you can pick up this modern gear and it happily
communicates with your laptop generally speaking.
Still like my 400lbs of test HP and Tek gear.
Paul
WB8TSL

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 2:20 PM, William H. Fite omniryx@gmail.com wrote:

When in the field and one of those cheap 'disposable' instruments fail and pointed questions are asked  That's when you miss the quality of the old HP gear  And I still use the old pre Carly gear precisely because it can be trusted to work in adverse conditions even though one needs to wash the data through a computer to get the measurement features that the new stuff has built in

The new gear had a name at one time we called it experimenter grade.  Much of the new gear these days reminds me of Eico equipment in overall build quality

Content by Scott
Typos by Siri

I was with HP 1972-79, when it was still a great company. The vertical
integration was such that there was a joke about HP plant site
landscaping, which always seemed to feature ferns. The reply was ,
"We're making our own coal!" We not only had packaging engineers but
made our own cabinets. We made our own integrated circuits; I made the
photomasks for those ICs in the Santa Clara Division (02, the old
Frequency&Time Division) in building 51-Lower, next to the line where
the counters were wired. Good times, free coffee.

Jeremy
N6WFO

On 2/14/2016 10:10 AM, Scott McGrath wrote:

I was never with HP but I bought (using Hughes Aircraft and US government money)
megabucks worth of HP Instruments.  The whole facility bought millions more.
The local Tucson HP sales office had a salesman assigned just to Hughes. They
showered us with catalogs, app notes, training programs, seminars and I even
traveled a few times to attend programs elsewhere.  We paid for our own airfare
and hotel, but breakfasts, lunches, dinners, girly shows, etc were on HP.  In
discussing travel expense reporting with the rep, unlike Hughes where every
penny had to be accounted for, he said his reporting consisted of counting the
money in his wallet when he left and counting it again when he got back.  The
difference was his expense.

Wes  N7WS

On 2/14/2016 4:05 PM, Jeremy Nichols wrote:

Up to roughly the mid-1970s, even ordinary mortals, HP employees, could
fly first class if you were traveling on company business for HP and the
flight was longer than 3 hours. Even I, an lowly process engineer,
included in a shopping trip "back east" to Boston and Philly, got to fly
first class. HP sent five employees on this shopping trip—God only knows
what it cost. That was then, when HP had more cash than it knew what to
do with.

J.

On 2/14/2016 4:48 PM, Wes (N7WS) wrote:

HI

I can indeed think back to the 70’s and at least somewhat earlier than that. Without naming names (and getting
everybody mad), there is a pretty long list of companies that had a good thing going through the 50’s and 60’s.
I worked for several of them. Life was good. Big money was made in markets that who ever it was commanded some
insane market share. That list includes companies in the US and a lot of other places.

Thirty to forty years later I look at the entire list and every single one of them was in trouble. Another ten years
later, they are gone or they are in worse trouble or they have re-organized to the point they have no relation to
the original company. Each time the stories come out, it sounds like it happened to just one company that somehow
“lost it’s way”. The real answer appears to be that what happened happened to all of them and it did so over a fairly
short period.

No I don’t want to get into adding names to the list. My only point is - a company that was great and  that is still
here in any sort of recognizable form is doing far far better than 90+% of its “peers” back in the old days.

Bob

On 2/14/2016 11:20 AM, William H. Fite wrote:

When I worked for HP/Agilent, there were countless examples of
low cost instrument prototypes developed at the central research
lab (HP Labs, and successors) that were killed by the manufacturing
divisions because they would "cannibalize sales" of the incumbent
product line.  The other excuse given was that it would "divert
resources" from the incumbent product line.  Or that the sales
force wouldn't sell it because there wasn't enough commission in it.
And we couldn't sell it direct because that would ruffle too many
feathers in the field.  I helped develop a product for which we had
large volume purchase orders from several customers and they still
killed it.

Rick

In message AAC42A04-6252-4CD0-B53F-EA2860B399CA@n1k.org, Bob Camp writes:

That "thing" is called "the cold war" where USA poured 10-20% of the
entire federal budget into high-tech and consequent innovations.

(while claiming to be a "capitalistic market economy" :-)

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG        | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer      | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Moin,

Taking this off-list as this is getting far too OT.

On Sun, 14 Feb 2016 14:20:52 -0500
"William H. Fite" omniryx@gmail.com wrote:

No, it doesn't. A Rigol might be a usable replacement if you cannot
affort a real instrument, but it far from being something you want
to rely on. Yes, a Tek scope starts from 1000$ up while a Rigol is
half or even a third of that price. But you get all kind of weird
effects when you use a Rigol. Which means you are never exactly sure
whether you see an actual effect of your device or it's just some
weirdness of your measurement equipment.

The price of Tek/Keysight/R&S does not come from the parts. By far not.
It comes from the fact that they ensure that you can measure with
confidence. Half of this is done by proper design (not only schematic,
but also layout and mechanics) and by doing extensive production tests that
do check for various problems, that are not easily seen.

When it comes to instruments where analog makes up 90% of the performance
and you cannot hide problems with digital processing, then Rigol
comes to the same price as the others.

Eg the DM3058 5.5 digit DMM costs 620€, that's just actually, 40€
more expensive than an U3402A. And mind you, the specs of the DM3058
are worse than that of the U3402A.

Definitly not. Yes, these have become basic gear you just have in an
electronics lab. But they are handled with care and you don't just buy
another if you just haven't have one at hand. Proper gear is investement.

			Attila Kinali

--
It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All
the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no
use without that foundation.
-- Miss Matheson, The Diamond Age, Neil Stephenson