The Israelis do it again!

[echen1024]

Another "totally harmonically distorted: meter for a low, low, low price of only $199.99
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Keithley-2015-Total-Harmonic-Distortion-Multimeter-/231166283545?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item35d2958f19

[linux-works]

never ever bring a meter to a gun fight.

you'll lose every time.

[SgtRock]

Greetings EEVBees:

--Definitely teenagers.

"Get that quarterback"
Gator Dundee
1948  -

Best Regards
Clear Ether

[samcramer]

I'm confused by this thread.

There's a seller from Israel, and somehow the listings of that seller characterizes all Israelis?

Do the bigoted postings of people who seize on the nationality of one person in order to smear a whole nation also indict the home countries of those who post such stuff?

Stick to the electronics, guys, and lay off the hate.

[echen1024]

I'm confused by this thread.

There's a seller from Israel, and somehow the listings of that seller characterizes all Israelis?

Do the bigoted postings of people who seize on the nationality of one person in order to smear a whole nation also indict the home countries of those who post such stuff?

Stick to the electronics, guys, and lay off the hate.

No, it's just that a lot of the Israeli liquidators like selling completely smashed test gear for high prices.

[John Coloccia]

It's a $4000+ THD meter that's being sold for parts for $200.  Is there a joke I'm missing?  If you had a THD meter in your shop with a blown up board, you'd be tripping over yourself to buy this thing before someone else did.

BTW, I'm with Dave...I don't see anything bigoted here, but this item is a steal for someone that needs to fix their own meter.

[EEVblog]

I'm confused by this thread.
There's a seller from Israel, and somehow the listings of that seller characterizes all Israelis?
Do the bigoted postings of people who seize on the nationality of one person in order to smear a whole nation also indict the home countries of those who post such stuff?
Stick to the electronics, guys, and lay off the hate.

Chill out dude.
No one is branding all Israelis, it's just a gag about how crap stuff always pops up on ebay, and it's always from the same or or two Israeli sellers.
Same way people joke about crap Chinese stuff. Anyone with any intelligence knows that China can make good stuff too, just like not all Israeli's beat the crap out of their gear.
There is no hate happening here. If you think so, then you are applying far too much political correctness to what is being said. I'd suggest easing up on that, the world has too much PC to go around already.

[echen1024]

It's a $4000+ THD meter that's being sold for parts for $200.  Is there a joke I'm missing?  If you had a THD meter in your shop with a blown up board, you'd be tripping over yourself to buy this thing before someone else did.

really?
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Keithley-2015THD-6-5-digit-bench-DMM-multimeter-with-harmonic-analysis-/351042596997?pt=UK_BOI_Electrical_Test_Measurement_Equipment_ET&hash=item51bbc4f085

[digsys]

I'm confused by this thread.
There's a seller from Israel, and somehow the listings of that seller characterizes all Israelis?
Do the bigoted postings of people who seize on the nationality of one person in order to smear a whole nation also indict the home countries of those who post such stuff?
Stick to the electronics, guys, and lay off the hate. 

Calm down and take your medsl, Mr 2 posts.
This is an old, long running scene of some peanut (no one cares where from) who'se been selling totally crap / damaged goods
and asking stupid rediculous prices. I, amongst others, immediately KNEW what he was talking about without even reading
the post .... and had a chuckle upon reading it. This guy was / is from Israel, selling junk and it was only that (rare) combination
that made the post easy to remember. What if we go back to "bashing" the Chinese! Would that make you happy? :-)
Think before you leap.

[EEVblog]

It's a $4000+ THD meter that's being sold for parts for $200.  Is there a joke I'm missing?

Yes, the joke is that this seller always sells stuff that looks like it's been shot at, crushed, or blown up.
This badly abused stuff pops up so frequently in ebay searches for test gear that it would be genuinely useful to be able to exclude Israel from worldwide searches.
And that's not being racist or whatever term you want to throw at it, it's just a practical reality of ebay searching for test gear.

[John Coloccia]

It's a $4000+ THD meter that's being sold for parts for $200.  Is there a joke I'm missing?  If you had a THD meter in your shop with a blown up board, you'd be tripping over yourself to buy this thing before someone else did.

really?
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Keithley-2015THD-6-5-digit-bench-DMM-multimeter-with-harmonic-analysis-/351042596997?pt=UK_BOI_Electrical_Test_Measurement_Equipment_ET&hash=item51bbc4f085

I didn't know they sold that cheaply used...that's still over $500.  So I take it back.  It's definitely a little high.

[John Coloccia]

It's a $4000+ THD meter that's being sold for parts for $200.  Is there a joke I'm missing?

Yes, the joke is that this seller always sells stuff that looks like it's been shot at, crushed, or blown up.
This badly abused stuff pops up so frequently in ebay searches for test gear that it would be genuinely useful to be able to exclude Israel from worldwide searches.
And that's not being racist or whatever term you want to throw at it, it's just a practical reality of ebay searching for test gear.

There's a lot of countries I exclude from my worldwide searches...LOL.

[calexanian]

For many years I have been buying from and selling to Israeli companies. I find them to actually be more fair on average than many vendors and customers in other parts of the world. Spain is awful. I would say the worst actually based on long payment term demands and continuous nagging and nit picking. One company over there outright copied our product to the point where their distributors were sending them to us in America to repair thinking we made them! True you do encounter the typical price price price type people in every culture and country, but I can not think of any specific dealing with an Israeli company that has ended badly and many of my favorite customers to talk to are either first or second generation American families from Israel. For that matter I have also had good experiences, all be it to a lesser volume from the arab nations. In fact some of them prefer to buy from an Armenian owned company from the US rather than Isarel, but that is a different conversation. In the business world over there are many dealings with Arabs and Israelis and among educated people there is much more commonality and understanding than we think sometimes, based on our popular news.

[TheBorg]

My guess is that they have a group of 9th graders in an electronics class that moves equipment around regularly.

I mean, have you ever seen 30 fourteen year olds trying to solder for the first time? Usually its about 20 minutes before someone leaves a soldering iron on, bumps it, and burns into the cord of a power supply.

Stuff got dropped all the time when I was in class (luckily it was usually just multimeters. Think there were only a couple people that dropped power supplies and stuff that year, thank goodness).

[John Coloccia]

I only see this stuff when someone posts it here. It boggles the mind wondering how it could get to be in such condition. Surely it takes a fair bit of effort to make such a mess of a piece of test gear. At what point does someone decide it is worth it.

There was one a while back, an oscilloscope IIRC that looked like someone had stabbed it with the hot end of a soldering iron.

A good number of years ago, I was in the lab when one of our other engineers walked in from having taken a long vacation...went on a cruise around Africa, or something like that I think.  He calmly put down his little briefcase, walked over to one of our robots, and tried to give the command to toggle bit 100 to release the very carefully instrumented test package it's carrying (I think we were measuring the machine's dynamics).

Instead, he command the Z axis to move, open loop, at 100%.  Now, these were big robots designed for storing material in process for semiconductor fabs....this particular one was probably about 4 or 5 meters tall.  It shot straight up and smashed the test package to smithereens....broke both drive belts in the process, so of course it came crashing right back down and smashed all of the drive electronics in the "z-bucket".

There was no e-bay at the time so I'm not sure whatever happened to all that stuff.

[echen1024]

My guess is that they have a group of 9th graders in an electronics class that moves equipment around regularly.

I mean, have you ever seen 30 fourteen year olds trying to solder for the first time? Usually its about 20 minutes before someone leaves a soldering iron on, bumps it, and burns into the cord of a power supply.

Stuff got dropped all the time when I was in class (luckily it was usually just multimeters. Think there were only a couple people that dropped power supplies and stuff that year, thank goodness).

I was trying to teach a nephew (11) how to solder. Whoo-hoo! Burned the cord on the first go! Got him another iron, and through hole is not a problem now.

[calexanian]

When I was a kid I set one of our big Unger soldering irons we used for making harnesses on its own cord.. BANG!! I also set a office chair of fire when I rolled it up to the window to stand on and look our. The heater was a wall mount under the window. We still had that chair for years! Sometimes I miss those days.  My dad sure designed one hell of a reliable product in the electromech days.

[Kjelt]

I was trying to teach a nephew (11) how to solder. Whoo-hoo! Burned the cord on the first go! Got him another iron, and through hole is not a problem now.

Just taught my stepson (9) how to solder, first without power just handling the iron and which parts never ever to touch. Then with power, and everything went ok.
Too bad for your cord but better then the flesh  that kind of early bad experiences could ruin a perfect hobbie for the rest of his life.

[SolarSunrise]

It's a $4000+ THD meter that's being sold for parts for $200.  Is there a joke I'm missing?

Yes, the joke is that this seller always sells stuff that looks like it's been shot at, crushed, or blown up.
This badly abused stuff pops up so frequently in ebay searches for test gear that it would be genuinely useful to be able to exclude Israel from worldwide searches.
And that's not being racist or whatever term you want to throw at it, it's just a practical reality of ebay searching for test gear.

There's a lot of countries I exclude from my worldwide searches...LOL.

Well this 100Mhz 4 channel Tektronix, from the same seller, looks like a bargain:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/TEKTRONIX-2245A-100-MHz-OSCILLOSCOPE-/231046365211?pt=BI_Oscilloscopes&hash=item35cb6fc01b

You never know what you can find!

[Dago]

I only see this stuff when someone posts it here. It boggles the mind wondering how it could get to be in such condition. Surely it takes a fair bit of effort to make such a mess of a piece of test gear. At what point does someone decide it is worth it.

There was one a while back, an oscilloscope IIRC that looked like someone had stabbed it with the hot end of a soldering iron.

I'm pretty certain these are items that have been thrown away to the dump/recycling and these guys just go through them and sell the ones that are worth anything. Don't think they are experts in valuing the items, just try to give a best guess.

To me the meter the OP posted looks to be priced pretty fairly. Looking at the picture where it is opened it looks to be like "mint" inside and it looks like only the display is smashed. Just get a new display and it most likely works like new...

[Kohanbash]

Just to point out that out of 2743 reviews the seller has a 99.7% positive feedback.

[EEVblog]

Just to point out that out of 2743 reviews the seller has a 99.7% positive feedback.

I have no doubt you'll get your heap'o'crap in timely fashion and probably well packed, exactly as described. AAAAAAAAA+++++++++!

[krivx]

I've never bought from LiquidTech but I have got a Fluke 87 and a HP 3615a from surplustechmart and was happy with both deals. It's worth knowing that a lot of these surplus sellers will accept lower prices if you message them with an offer.

[zapta]

From Wikipedia

"Israel boasts the highest number of scientists, technicians, and engineers per capita in the world with 140 scientists, technicians, and engineers per 10,000 employees. In comparison, the same is 85 per 10,000 in the United States and 83 per 10,000 in Japan."

[ErikTheNorwegian]

Just show this link... have nothing else to say, every Picture tells a story, Rod said.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Hewlett-Packard-Agilent-E3631A-Triple-Output-DC-Power-Supply/151286835669?_trksid=p2047675.c100005.m1851&_trkparms=aid%3D222003%26algo%3DSIC.FIT%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D22426%26meid%3D6435096106881051084%26pid%3D100005%26prg%3D9723%26rk%3D3%26rkt%3D6%26sd%3D321365496478&rt=nc