Alternative DMMs to Fluke?
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From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Bjarne_B=E4ckstr=F6m?= on 11 Apr 2006 06:08 budgie <me(a)privacy.net> wrote: > You're not wrong. They'd have to partly explain the total demise of UK > electronic manufacturing. Telequipment are to CRO's what Lucas are to > auto electrics (hint: google Lucas and "prince of darkness"). Ah, from the time when I repaired my own cars and motorbikes, I remember the "Lucas darkness amplifier"... -- http://www.flexusergroup.com/
From: martin griffith on 11 Apr 2006 06:26 On Tue, 11 Apr 2006 12:08:16 +0200, in sci.electronics.design bskb(a)m.a.c.com (Bjarne B?ckstr?m) wrote: >budgie <me(a)privacy.net> wrote: > >> You're not wrong. They'd have to partly explain the total demise of UK >> electronic manufacturing. Telequipment are to CRO's what Lucas are to >> auto electrics (hint: google Lucas and "prince of darkness"). > > Ah, from the time when I repaired my own cars and motorbikes, I >remember the "Lucas darkness amplifier"... Italian bike electrics from the 70's were far worse than Joe Lucas's stuff. I still miss my Ducati 750.But you couldn't ride it at night in a built up area, as you had to go at least 70mph to keep the lights glimmering.... martin
From: Joel Kolstad on 11 Apr 2006 13:50 Hi Jim, "Jim Yanik" <jyanik(a)abuse.gov> wrote in message news:Xns97A1CCF86BC61jyanikkuanet(a)129.250.170.85... > What's the serial number begin with? A "T"?? > Beaverton TEK-made stuff comes with a "B" prefix s/n. It's a B! So perhaps Tek started out with manufacturing in Oregon and then moved it to Taiwan? I'm not certain when the thing was built -- I obtained it second-hand. I do know that the TX1 and TX3 were rather short-lived at Tek; my impression is that they were only sold for a couple of years before being discontinued. > BTW,TEK TDS scopes use a purchased power supply. Yeah, no surprise there. When you can get a 12V, 8A switching "brick" for something like $15 in quantity, I can't imagine trying to design such an item yourself. In fact, I was told that this was one of the main reasons the plug-in/mainframe approach to test equipment (e.g., the TM500 modules) died -- a big advantage was that you didn't keep purchasing the power supply again and again, which was a big ticket item back in the '60s and '70s. Once switchers became cheap, this advantage disappered and Tek sold off the TM500 line to some other manufacturer. ---Joel
From: Joel Kolstad on 11 Apr 2006 13:58 "Jim Yanik" <jyanik(a)abuse.gov> wrote in message news:Xns97A1EE39B95EBjyanikkuanet(a)129.250.170.83... > Now you can't even get a component-level schematic for your TEK TDS > scope;they don't want you trying to fix them yourself,even "obsolete" ones > they no longer service. Parts of Tek (not all of it -- there are still plenty of good people there) seem to now have the slightly paranoid "big company" attitude that their designs are many times better than anyone else's, and letting people have useful troublshooting information such as schematics is somehow going to let your competitors (who realistically often are just as skilled as Tek) mop the floor with your scopes. While I was there, the Big Management decision was that Tek didn't want other scope manufacturers to be able to use their probes, so there were even discussions about how -- while the current communications interface with the probes (which started out as an I2C connection to a serial EEPROM but had evolved into talking to a microcontroller) was proprietary and hence not publically documented -- perhaps the next interface should be completely encrypted, just to have a probe tell the scope that it's 10:1, 50 ohms, etc.! From a business school approach, I'm sure this is all quite defensible... but like Agilent today, it seems very much at odds with the business approach of the founders. ---Joel
From: Joel Kolstad on 11 Apr 2006 14:01
"Keith" <krw(a)att.bizzzz> wrote in message news:pan.2006.04.11.01.50.23.215901(a)att.bizzzz... > How is that different than a Mazda pickup truck or IBM Personal > Computer, or any number of a thousand different every day items? Sheesh, > indeed! It's not, and that's the problem: When you have company A that simply slaps their name on company B's product, obtaining service & support for that product is typically much more difficult than if you simply bought the product from company B to begin with. Additionally, the purchase price from company A is often higher than going the direct route! |