farnell's interesting categories

[Simon]

http://uk.farnell.com/diodes-rectifier-miscellaneous really easy to find parts there then

Some bright spark has also decided that we need to have the over 600V and under 600V mosfets separating into separate categories. And still not temperature options in their wonderous parametric search.

[Simon]

When I complained about errors (bad ones like putting +/-1C on a +/-2C sensor) they took two weeks to reply, digikey responded to a similar problem in 2 hours.

I keep offering my services to read and understand datasheets

[Zero999]

Farnell don't have enough technical staff. I doubt the people who work on their site know much about the products. A lot of it is probably automated.

[Simon]

They no very little and all use different ways of listing specs it's like every time they put a unit of measure in it creates itself as a new option as you will often find all in a row stuff like 10V 10VDC & 10 or even 10V DC they just haven't a clue, looking for logic level mosfets has been fun with 2V gate threshold as often the minimum voltage is listed not the highest and of course no logic level filter. Utterly hopeless, as i said to them when they rang me up I chose to use digikey for work becsause despite being more expensive saved me more time (money for my employer) than the difference in parts due to their inadequacy. I was told they were redesigning the site and all would be sorted, they launched it and frankly i see no difference.

[tom66]

When I was at a careers fair in Leeds Uni, which is the same city in which Farnell's UK base is, they were recruiting graduates of electronics engineering for technical data entry & support. I think it was £16k p.a. Given I could get the same as an engineering student without a degree, it's not really surprising that there are so many mistakes in their catalogue, they simply don't have the right people for the job that understand things like +/-0.05ohm on a 0 ohm resistor doesn't make sense, etc.

[Simon]

they probably rely more on people already knowing what they want or the simply don't understand but like i said. if I have to do a job for work it's straight to digikey as they are spot on and very responsive if there is an error found and to be fair the only one I did find was a very illusive one that required very careful and long studying of a datasheet that headlined a -55 spec but covered many parts in the datasheet of which only one was -55C