Kiss Analog butthurt over Dave getting free stuff

[soldar]

No way I am watching a video over an hour long to listen to some incoherent guy go around.

If he can't tell me what he wants to tell me in ten minutes or less then, I'm sorry but I don't have the time.

[Someone]

For that reason, hobby or a small workshop may be ""fine"" equipped with Rigol scopes, Uni-T meters and JBC imitation irons, while a larger company has strict rules on which brands to buy.

Big companies are also interested in value for money and do buy "low rent" brands. Oddly enough there are situations where a small shop is better of with just a higher end item (if they absolutely need some higher end capability, the rest is already "free") as there may not be demand for simultaneous use, where as a big company is more likely to have a diverse fleet of equipment that can be allocated/used as needed across the simultaneous tasks.

You ain't getting something like a Uni-T over the threshold of a large company, the reality is that you usually have an entire department dedicated to purchasing things and it's not uncommon they actually have a safety checklist for lab equipment.

I have not seen anyone intervene from purchasing for safety reasons. Any of: preferred supplier, cost, delivery method, domestic vs international.
Approvals chain is where the time is wasted, good bosses have found smooth ways to avoid that and fit for purpose stuff just gets bought. Cheap things like a Uni-T meter would disappear from oversight through low value or stuffing it within a larger order.

Coming from experience of very large organisations that would happily put off brand equipment out in R&D. Some places might have rules, but even those that do can have people who ignore them (and then hide the evidence when it might be noticed).

[ifonlyeverything]

From one Ramblin' Man to another, he would benefit greatly from a script or at least some bullet points on an index card.

[Veteran68]

From one Ramblin' Man to another, he would benefit greatly from a script or at least some bullet points on an index card.

The funny thing is he HAS notes on a notebook in front of him. He just can’t stay on track. I think there may be some AD(H)D at play here.

[coppercone2]

fuck cheap scopes at work its a total troll especially if you are prototyping you need the best of the best without glitches. the amount of back and forth a bad scope reading can generate is preposterous and it can make any engineer look like a blundering fool that is incapable of evaluating even the most simple matters.

with the pay of engineers and how much voodoo they are expected to push and evaluate for clueless bureaucrats the scope price is absolutely justified. Sometimes you get 1 day to have to confidently give the answer to a question which can effect a quarter and a entire sales plan for people that make many millions every month and effect an entire work force.

that means bandwidth, trigger, alias, interconnects need to be as good as they can make it. You will still make mistakes but it keeps it down, and there still will be triggering issues.

[nctnico]

fuck cheap scopes at work its a total troll especially if you are prototyping you need the best of the best without glitches. the amount of back and forth a bad scope reading can generate is preposterous and it can make any engineer look like a blundering fool that is incapable of evaluating even the most simple matters.

with the pay of engineers and how much voodoo they are expected to push and evaluate for clueless bureaucrats the scope price is absolutely justified. Sometimes you get 1 day to have to confidently give the answer to a question which can effect a quarter and a entire sales plan for people that make many millions every month and effect an entire work force.

This goes for test equipment in general. If been in situations where a bug in a piece of B-brand equipment caused a couple of weeks of delay and impacted an important demo.

[coppercone2]

but the scope is going to be the one that makes the picture that someone non technical can understand

the other instruments make tables, then they think you are buying expensive furniture, and the spectrum analyzer is not in english (that graph is in ancient egyptian). you don't want to explain the signal power within a bandwidth, ever. how come the signal is not moving?

[analityk]

I've worked some time for client from Gas and oil industry and from this point of view everything in this film is true.
If in some test procedures some engineer point they use fluke 87 there is always "or equivalent" device and you are free to use siglent as long as it have actual 'papers'.

And point out with buying laptop for 20k with fronted worth 2k is gold. If Tek can use Windows on frontline and most important scopes why military can not? It obvious. Tek scope are not need be so reliable as military grade device.

Point out with industrial components. There is a few temp. grades category where manufacturers can specified some parameters that will always be in some range. There is also reliability test and data you can study during finding out a new components. But it make senses when you want to sold fucktylion devices. Then MTTF, MTBF and FMECA, which one scope manufacturers do FMECA... BS. Maybe Tek or other overpriced scopes use industrial grade device but it doesn't make sense. Show me your Tek spec and temp range where you can use them. -25 to +85 degree of Celsius? Show me this LCD working under -25 C.

[rsjsouza]

I have not seen anyone intervene from purchasing for safety reasons. Any of: preferred supplier, cost, delivery method, domestic vs international.
Approvals chain is where the time is wasted, good bosses have found smooth ways to avoid that and fit for purpose stuff just gets bought. Cheap things like a Uni-T meter would disappear from oversight through low value or stuffing it within a larger order.

That is my experience as well. If the cost is below a certain arbitrary threshold you can get anything. Above this, if a product is from one of the non-traditional companies, be prepared to back it up with technical and long term maintenance reports to justify the purchase.

[rsjsouza]

fuck cheap scopes at work its a total troll especially if you are prototyping you need the best of the best without glitches. the amount of back and forth a bad scope reading can generate is preposterous and it can make any engineer look like a blundering fool that is incapable of evaluating even the most simple matters.

with the pay of engineers and how much voodoo they are expected to push and evaluate for clueless bureaucrats the scope price is absolutely justified. Sometimes you get 1 day to have to confidently give the answer to a question which can effect a quarter and a entire sales plan for people that make many millions every month and effect an entire work force.

This goes for test equipment in general. If been in situations where a bug in a piece of B-brand equipment caused a couple of weeks of delay and impacted an important demo.

I have seen this lack of willingness to purchase the right equipment hamper development for quite some time. Add to this the engineers' time, RTM delay and other factors, and the initial ~$100k capex was easily offset.

OTOH, I also have saved weeks of troubleshooting by using my personally-owned Rigol DS4014 and its deep memory instead of the ancient Tek TDS3054s or Agilent DSO6054As available at work.

[coppercone2]

even for day to day operations its a benefit towards making people not hate you. if you need to work with someone and you got deep zoom then you can get by doing 1/2 the measurements for zeroing in on specifics, even something simple like a switch.

then you have a '45 minute guy' and the 'never ending meeting' guy that a tech or coworker might need to work with. they don't wanna be sitting with you all day because you can't get what you want for them to write down. like if they keep having to redo something on a PC.

[Ice-Tea]

Fun story: when visiting a Chinese ODM's design office in Shenzen, they both had high end Rigol/Sigilent and Keysight/Tek testgear.

The Rigols and Sigilents were in the cupboard, the Teks and Keysights were on the bench.

[HalFET]

In SMEs I saw it get bypassed, in large corporations with a working quality management system that demands paperwork, and fat chance you're getting an actual calibration certificate or traceable safety test paperwork from these cheaper manufacturers.

[Someone]

In SMEs I saw it get bypassed, in large corporations with a working quality management system that demands paperwork, and fat chance you're getting an actual calibration certificate or traceable safety test paperwork from these cheaper manufacturers.

Sure, but how much of the test equipment in a large organisation is inside the calibration/quality system? When that sort of system is in place the equipment I would use day to day (from "A" brands) had big stickers reminding the user it was not known to be accurate and outside the calibration chain.

Does a firmware engineer really care about the voltage accuracy of a I2C bus? or just wants to check its roughly correct and the timing between bytes/messages is what was expected? Neither would that have any safety implications on the choice of instrument.

Having ready access to sufficient test equipment is better than waiting for something more than sufficient.

[rsjsouza]

What's your thoughts?

That was quite a bad video overall. I listened to about 75% of it and its SNR is quite low due to his wild tangents and circular reasoning. His presentation detracts a lot from his credibility. The vast majority of claims based solely on opinion and not facts, tied to the excessive use of foul language and the nice beer on the side do no favours  - it gave me the image of the slightly drunk uncle talking heated topics on a family dinner.

There are several weird things you pointed out, but upfront the wild claim that "all is BS" highlights his lack of expertise with the wide variety of test equipment in use across the industry. Sure, the title of the video is about "Tek oscilloscopes", but his claimed expertise should have taught him that many other types of instruments exist and require more specialized calibration/maintenance services than the typical DSO/DMM/SpecAn trio (protocol analyzers, for example). Not only that but what would a T&M manufacturer do to calibrate and adjust their newly manufactured product? Send it to a third party calibration center? I sincerely doubt it would be more cost effective. Oh well... Perhaps was the beer talking, I don't know...

In the video he claim he doesn't "owe" anything to the company's that send him free stuff, but insinuate that Dave does because he gets stuff that cost more than the stuff he get's.

That is the worst part of the video IMO. The "holier than thou" attitude does the opposite to add weight to his proclaimed impartiality and credibility - only to see the pop ups and the description of the video advertise units from Owon, Kaiweets, etc. Everyone is hustling their own way and his glass ceiling can bring him some trouble with the shade cast to a fellow youtuber.

He doesn't want to pay Tek prices because they develop and implement educational stuff in their scopes, and as an educator he doesn't want students to learn from these tools, but use "real equipment" in stead.´

The educational market is one of his strongest points but he wanders in very wild tangents about BNC cables not being probes and land on how schools are not preparing students for real life due to the educational material built into the equipment. I agree with this, but the SNR was quite low there.

This I don't understand at all: He says they (Tek scopes I assume) doesn't have industrial grade components inside, but commercial grade. But then he say's some might have, but he haven't seen it.

Well, another void and circular reasoning. If every IC is made in China anyways, it must all have the same quality and no value is placed in scrutiny of parts selection, proper circuit design and manufacturing refinement. It shows his lack of understanding about whole product design and (disingenuously?) props up the other brands he promotes. Or it might also have been the beer talking again...

He doesn't care about the life span of the equipment either. If the manufacture no longer offers the product, he'll just buy something better ten years later.

Again lack of experience. He would be surprised at the age of the (excellent) equipment I still see in quite advanced labs... Sure, a TDS3054 or a Flue 8050 are obsolete for a great deal of tasks, but it is not restricted to that. Longevity is king and lowers TCO.

At around 43 minutes he talks about UI refinement (valid point) but goes on a tangent about font sizes and the difficulty of adjusting the acquisition settings on an oscilloscope from Tek. Several minutes later he talks about how a few months later they come up with a firmware that addresses the two issues. Who is paying for those engineers to implement this? Certainly not Owon and their SDS1202 advertised on his video.

Oh well... I am pretty sure he will have a great deal of views/revenue and clicks due to the title, so all the best on his hustle.

[SiliconWizard]

It's like people discover the YT business every single day. Fascinating.

[rsjsouza]

It's like people discover the YT business every single day. Fascinating.

[joeqsmith]

I played it for some background noise.  Found it a bit difficult to follow along without paying attention.  Not watching Dave's videos he referenced for context didn't help.   

My only problem with other videos they he made was lack of substance.  Maybe the drinking played a roll in how scattered this one was.   I found it interesting that he felt the need to talk about his professional background.  Personally, I would rank his skills based on content, not lip service and didn't find it adding anything to the video but was rather a distraction.

It's been several years since I looked at buying a scope for home.  I have only bought one new scope in my entire life.  The rest have all been used.   My hobby exceeds my budget so my only choice is the used market.

He mentions PICO a few times.  I had actually written them about sending one of their 8GHz VNAs to make some videos and show it off.  No luck though.  My channel may be too small to generate any interest.  That and with ads turned off and no way to provide funding, they may not like my total sink business model. 

I'm currently looking at a new scope for work.  Normally I have some sort of decision matrix and will bring in a few companies for a demo and try them out for a month or so.   While I normally include cost as a metric,  it has little weight compared to what functions I need the equipment for.   I'm not sure about his comments on calibration.  We will send off some of our equipment for calibration rather than using the companies that come on-site.   Than  again, a lot of it may never get calibrated.   It depends.   

I'm sure his comments and story about poor firmware strike a cord with many of us.  The same for the UI.  That's part of why I will do a month evaluation. 

[HalFET]

In SMEs I saw it get bypassed, in large corporations with a working quality management system that demands paperwork, and fat chance you're getting an actual calibration certificate or traceable safety test paperwork from these cheaper manufacturers.

Sure, but how much of the test equipment in a large organisation is inside the calibration/quality system? When that sort of system is in place the equipment I would use day to day (from "A" brands) had big stickers reminding the user it was not known to be accurate and outside the calibration chain.

Does a firmware engineer really care about the voltage accuracy of a I2C bus? or just wants to check its roughly correct and the timing between bytes/messages is what was expected? Neither would that have any safety implications on the choice of instrument.

Having ready access to sufficient test equipment is better than waiting for something more than sufficient.

In our case, everything is tracked and calibration is kept up to date, even on the office multimeters that get used maybe five times a year. They don't want to run the risk of someone using an uncalibrated instrument for something critical. The liability cost of having uncalibrated instruments far exceeds the cost of calibration.

[Someone]

In SMEs I saw it get bypassed, in large corporations with a working quality management system that demands paperwork, and fat chance you're getting an actual calibration certificate or traceable safety test paperwork from these cheaper manufacturers.

Sure, but how much of the test equipment in a large organisation is inside the calibration/quality system? When that sort of system is in place the equipment I would use day to day (from "A" brands) had big stickers reminding the user it was not known to be accurate and outside the calibration chain.

Does a firmware engineer really care about the voltage accuracy of a I2C bus? or just wants to check its roughly correct and the timing between bytes/messages is what was expected? Neither would that have any safety implications on the choice of instrument.

Having ready access to sufficient test equipment is better than waiting for something more than sufficient.

In our case, everything is tracked and calibration is kept up to date, even on the office multimeters that get used maybe five times a year. They don't want to run the risk of someone using an uncalibrated instrument for something critical. The liability cost of having uncalibrated instruments far exceeds the cost of calibration.

I can believe there are some businesses taking that approach to avoid people using uncalibrated equipment for a task which requires it, and the need varies wildly depending on market/regulations. Your situation seems to be the minority, if they provide sufficient equipment and its all calibrated that sounds very well supported and a nice place to work.

[nctnico]

Don't forget calibration is not just about accuracy of measurements but also means subjecting an instrument to a (limited) functional test.

[joeqsmith]

Don't forget calibration is not just about accuracy of measurements but also means subjecting an instrument to a (limited) functional test.

I would say it's pretty much a full on functional test.  Then again, I am sure we all have some horror stories when it comes to calibration houses. 

[Someone]

Don't forget calibration is not just about accuracy of measurements but also means subjecting an instrument to a (limited) functional test.

I would say it's pretty much a full on functional test.  Then again, I am sure we all have some horror stories when it comes to calibration houses.

For a meter it is pretty typical to have at least one test recorded against every range. But more complex instruments such as scopes only have some of their parameters verified (and/or listed as warranted in the specifications), say channel to channel crosstalk for instance being unwarranted and untested. Or bandwidth, warranted, but untested in different voltage ranges.

[joeqsmith]

For a meter it is pretty typical to have at least one test recorded against every range. But more complex instruments such as scopes only have some of their parameters verified (and/or listed as warranted in the specifications), say channel to channel crosstalk for instance being unwarranted and untested. Or bandwidth, warranted, but untested in different voltage ranges.

Looking at my last report for my old Wavemaster scope, it looks like 43 parameters were verified by the factory.  I would say that's a fairly exhaustive test. Again, the idea is to prove that  the equipment still meets the manufacture's specifications.  That means all of them, not a few selected ones.

From listening to that video, it seemed Dave made a big deal out of calibration where the presenter felt they could just use what ever lab they like.   Maybe that's fine, maybe not.  As I said, I am sure we all have some horror stories when it comes to calibration.   Higher end equipment I would tend to return to the manufacture knowing they have any specialized test jigs, software, equipment required to do a proper job of it.   

[joeqsmith]

For the bandwidth you mentioned,  the factory tests all four channels at nine different voltage levels, not one.  Mine is an 8500A which is spec'ed to 5GHz.  So they test at 5.001GHz and make sure the signal is higher than -3dB.  They also look at flatness.   These tests give me some idea how far I can push the scope.  For example, a few weeks ago I posted a screen shot from this scope where I excited a 6GHz filter with a pulse: 

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/show-us-your-square-wave/msg5163876/#msg5163876

During the video, he talks a lot about his background in power supplies.  True or not, doesn't really mater but I doubt many people would want a scope like mine for that sort of work.  I have a lower end (well, all my scopes are used and very old so...)   that I use for the majority of my experimenting.   Point being, he may consider $5kUSD a very high end scope and there is no need for anything better.  Something like the electrician who wrote me how there was never any need to look at signals beyond 60Hz.  That's the world he lives in, even though our voices and ears work at much higher frequencies.   

****
Thinking about reviews, I have not seen this particular person do it, but I have seen others call Dave a snob when it comes to recommendations he makes regarding handheld multi-meters.  When it comes to oscilloscopes, this person may view the use of higher end ones being a bit of a snob as well.   He may be totally ignorant about their applications.