[time-nuts] Test Equipment

[John Foege]

Thanks to everyone who answered in this thread.I am keenly interested
in everything everyone had to say!

One of the things that seems like a no-brainer, would be to scrape
together the $700 and get an Agilent E8285A CDMA test set. It seems
like I can't go wrong with that! My only concern with getting these
off eBay or from anywhere else for that matter, is that apparently the
later versions firmware only support 800Mhz and up operation instead
of the earlier versions 100kHz-1Ghz.

Unfortunately, Amtronix seems to have run out, or at least are on
their last 1-2 units. I wont have the cash in time to get one, as they
have sold 35 in the last month alone.

Sigh.

Another very cool set of toys that had been mentioned, were the Tek
TM500 series, which I am also interested in! I don't need any of the
freq. counter plugins, but the power supply, func. generators, etc.
All very cool!

Thanks,

John

On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 5:18 AM, Magnus Danielson
<magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org> wrote:
> Bob Camp wrote:
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> About 8 years ago a whole lot of companies dumped a whole lot of test
>> gear. Prices dropped rapidly as they did so. It's taken us all quite a while
>> to burn through that pile of stuff.
>> The amazing thing is that as bad as the economy is now, you don't see
>> people doing the same sort of thing. You see oceans of people out of work,
>> but not piles of test gear getting sold off.
>
> Well, when the .com bubble bursted, it had been preceeded by massive
> acceleration of an instrument-hungry industry. As the bubble bursted, both
> .com companies and otherwise stable companies accelerated by their customers
> suffered. Some folded in and some just barely survived.
>
> This time it was the economy folks that fluked it. Instrument hungry
> industry only suffers indirectly.
>
> Cheers,
> Magnus
>
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