Other collecting activities?

On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 22:03:56 -0400 (EDT) William Donzelli <aw288(a)osfn.org> wrote: I've admired the quality of a lot of the older General Radio equipment. I have a General Radio 1650 LCR Bridge, and a few other pieces of their equipment. They produced gear where they made no compromises in quality. You open up the chassis on old G-R gear and you see the physics all laid out the way a scientist would do it. Not like the 'quality engineered out by the MBA cost-cutters' junk produced at instrument vendors today. I, too am fascinated and collect high-end test equipment. A number of years back it seemed like all the calibration labs were jettisoning all their time-honored highest quality items, i.e. Hardwood enclosed Standard Cell ovens, ultra-precision bridges and references. A friend of mine has a huge quantity of that sort of stuff, and I have built up a large collection of my own 'standards' in the form of stable well-characterized inductors, capacitors, and resistors. There don't seem to be many 'Metrology equipment collectors' but I do know of a few people maintaining and tracking frequency standards, keeping the old reistance and voltage standards, etc. These days everything seems to be 'autocal' with calibration based on settings stored in a lithium-battery backed up RAM. My G-R 1650 bridge, ten or more years 'out of calibration,' checks as exactly in calibration when I check it with components measured on 'in cal' digital equipment. A half century from now it'll still be accurate, since it's calibration is based on a physical adjustment. All the new 'digital' stuff will have dead batteries and be worthless, unless some 'credentialed' laboratory pushes a few buttons and puts another $150 sticker on it saying it's 'good' for another two years.