Experience with/alternatives to Fluke Met/Cal?

[guy48065]

My employer recently bought me a new Fluke 5522A calibration standard and Met/Cal to bring my lab up to date with more automation.  I have no prior experience with Met/Cal and I'm not a programmer.  My experience so far is you MUST be a programmer to use this program!  My efficiency has plummeted since I started scaling the vertical learning curve of building a database, finding and/or modifying procedures, and modifying the report templates.

What other calibration programs communicate with instruments and standards and are easier to use than Met/Cal?

[guy48065]

Ok I'm new here...there's not many Metrologists in the metrology section?

[TiN]

Most of us are hobbyists, doing stuff at home, so not many of local members here used MET/CAL thing.
Why you have to be a programmer? There are number of procedures on Fluke's website for use with 552X MFCs and various instruments, should be rather plug'n'pray experience...

Perhaps if you can share some specific questions, someone can help you out with details.

[guy48065]

Perhaps if you can share some specific questions, someone can help you out with details.

There are many hundreds of procedures available...and one of the reasons there are so many is the procedure itself sets all the parameters for the calibration. Which instruments you have, which version of the UUT is to be calibrated, whether you need error calculations to display on the report ,  etc. You'd expect such minutae to be chosen by the interface,  but Met/Cal is rather behind the times so the operator must make changes & choices via code.

Really just looking for an alternative to Met/Cal.

[quarks]

so far I only played around with Wavetek Portocal, but it is obsolete and you need a hardware dongle (which I unfortunately do not have).
Therefore my own first choice would be Fluke MET/CAL.
 
For alternatives I would have a look at:
Transmille PROCAL
Time Electronics EasyCal

[guy48065]

Transmille: I did "test drive" this last year.  Does comply with ISO 17025 requirements re uncertainties, but very limited support of US instruments.  Maybe in years to come...

Gossen:  (1) Only supports Gossen.  (2) It's a data acquisition platform, not calibration software.

Time: I've sent an email inquiry to answer the following: (rather sketchy that these things are omitted on the site)
Support for uncertainty display on certificates?  (website hints it's all manually calculated, no examples)
List of supported instruments & standards.

[acbern]

Anybody experience with Surecal? (Northrup Grumman)
Looks interesting on paper, but awfully expensive.