EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Test Equipment => Topic started by: rhb on October 21, 2017, 05:37:53 pm
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I'd like some feedback on GW Instek's tech support. Is it any good or are buyers on their own after the sale?
I've been considering buying an Instek MSO, SA & PS (~$6k online). After reading the manuals I put together a list of questions abut the MSO and sent them to the tech support email in Taiwan. These did not require complex answers. Questions included the lengths of the FFTs, window function types (no triangular "Bartlett" window ??), remote disk access protocol (CIFS, NFS), time correlation of analog and digital traces, file formats, data transfer rates to a PC, etc. A total of 8 to 10 questions. Mostly things the manuals should have stated clearly, but were ambiguous after several readings.
Rather than answer, tech support asked my location so they could forward my email to the appropriate sales office. I replied, but after nothing happened for a day or two I forwarded the questions the US sales office myself.
Rather than answer my questions I received a reply asking if I wanted to buy or learn and if I had a Hackaday.io project (WTF?).
The pre-sale response has made me a bit queasy about dropping $6k on Instek gear. So I thought it a good idea to ask here. How are they about post-sale support? Does their "limited lifetime warranty" really amount anything?
Thanks.
Reg
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I usually get more usefull answers from Taiwan but it may take a couple of days.
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I recently sent a tech support question via their website regarding a power supply problem that I was experiencing. Within a day I had received a response directly from the service manager located at the US California facility. We have exchanged about 6 emails over the last 2-3 weeks regarding my problem. He even contacted the Taiwan engineering group to report and ask questions for me. He also personally emailed me a firmware update for my power supply.
I'm not sure just how 'typical' my experience was but it sure was a pleasant one.
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I do not want to believe that I have seen this article.
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A followup:
I got a nice reply yesterday and most of my questions were answered. Not always as I wanted. Some answers did not quite address my concern. So I've sent more detail on those.
FFT length
How to load an arbitrary waveform to the AWG
Transfer time to save a long trace to USB or remote disk.
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The transfer time depends on the format you use. In case of binary it will take a few seconds to save a trace to either USB, SCPI or remote disk (Microsoft networking / SMB). I did some testing on my GDS2204E and it reaches 30Mbit/s using SCPI to transfer the binary data (16bits per sample) for a trace. For a 10Mpt trace it takes 5 seconds. When using CSV the amount of data is over 400MB so that will take considerably longer (also because the data needs to be formatted first). The GW Instek is pretty fast; I've seen much slower data transfer performances on other scopes.
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@nctnico
Thanks. SCPI over USB or LAN? My DS1102E writes CSV format to USB disk at 167 KB/s. Supposedly it's faster transferring to a USB host, but I've not tested that yet.
@Jakimaruhn
What is your issue with my question? Seems pretty reasonable to me that if I'm about to spend a bunch of money, I want to make sure I am going to be happy with what I get. I spent $45 for return shipping on a spectrum analyzer which I would not have bought if I'd looked past the spec sheets and read the manuals or investigated other people's experience with the OEM. I do try to learn from rather than repeat my mistakes.
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I only tested network (LAN).