18 Apr
2004
18 Apr
'04
8:25 a.m.
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.
This is why General Radio is really no longer with us. Even towards the
end, they still produced high quality gear, but did not sell much because
they couldn't see to ever cutting corners. When they retreated to the
niche of VLSI test equipment, they still made great gear, but most other
vendors did as well.
It is a real shame, but General Radio was just a little too conservative.
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.
Don't mock too much - calibration is a pretty serious business, and is
much more than just pushing a couple of buttons. There is actually a big
infrastructure in many of the shops. While it seems like an industry based
on the "rip off", it is not.
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org