On 14 Feb 2016 09:04, "Perry Sandeen via time-nuts" <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > It is rather depressing to me to hear RK and others remark about the unreliability of HP test equipment. > There is one area where they had outstanding equipment.
I have a friend with a fairly large lab. He must have 50 signal generators, 15 spectrum analyzers, plus plenty of other stuff. Mainly RF. Most is HP/Agilent, but he has Rohde & Scwarz and Anritsu too. He finds the HP the most reliable. Also Anritsu seem to charge a lot for calibration. A recent repair to a modern 6 GHz Anritsu signal generator resulted in the repair bill plus £1200 GBP (around $1800) for calibration. That particular sig gen, which was sold for mobile phone use, has an electronic attenuator that will blow up if a mobile phone is transmitted into it. He used to think he preferred R&S signal generators to Agilent, but the reliability of the R&S has been poorer so his mind has been changed on that. I am sure every company has some products that have been very reliable and some less so, but I would dispute that HP is in general less reliable than other decent makes. Support on HP is generally good, with the forums which are answered by Keysight staff. (An annoying exception seems to be LCR meters and Impedance analyzers developed in Japan. The Japanese engineers hardly ever visit the forums so questions on LCR meters and impedance analyzers generally get no response.) There are instrument ranges where other manufacturers seem better (e.g. Keithley for electrometers), but overall HP/Agilent seem the best choice to me. I know someone who is looking for a 20.GHz VNA. He just lost out on a Windows based R&S VNA that sold on eBay for a bit over $7000. There's no way a 20 GHz Windows based Agilent VNA would fetch so little. This is reflected in their higher resale values. At least with the older stuff,, service manuals for HP are useful, though modern service manuals are less so. Just my opinion. Dave. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
