Who buys the ultra-expensive test equipment, and what's it used for?

[Fried Chicken]

For example, you could buy a house, or you could by this used R&S wideband receiver, and if you look at the seller's other listing's, you've got all sorts of options ranging from a nice used motorcycle, to a nice new luxury car, to a house.

Who is buying this?!  Where is it used?  What industries need this sort of test equipment and why?  I mean these questions earnestly...  I'm no stranger to hundred-thousand dollar lasers (for two-photon microscopy, and other imaging applications) along with similarly expensive equipment.

But what's driving the development of this new ever-more capable, ever more expensive equipment?  It seems like the test equipment industry is alive and well as it's ever been over the past 50 years.  I wouldn't even know what to do with a $400k wideband receiver.  Hook probes up to it?

[coppercone2]

development of advanced electronics product and quality assurance on advanced electronics products.

If you think that is bad look at fiber optics related equipment LOL

Look at the pictures in the sales brochures to see who is using it. Might be a F22 raptor, a satellite uplink or something on a humvee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6G

it will answer the eternal question, that is, will that smart watch prevent the ringer from working? and can we sell it in the USA and Europe without paying the Chinese guys for a redesign?

[coppercone2]

they usually live in buildings that look like this with some crappy modern art (unmaintained) at the door

[Fungus]

Anything is cheap/disposable if you're using it to develop something that's even more expensive.

eg. I once bought a $50,000 SGI workstation with my own money because I had a $60,000 job opportunity.

Never used it much after that and eventually gave it away to a local kid... those things went obsolete fast.

(ah, the old days...)

[Smokey]

The EMC testing lab I've been using has an obscene amount of gear like that.  Gotta spend money to make money... or something like that...

[Fried Chicken]

Anything is cheap/disposable if you're using it to develop something that's even more expensive.

eg. I once bought a $50,000 SGI workstation with my own money because I had a $60,000 job opportunity.

Never used it much after that and eventually gave it away to a local kid... those things went obsolete fast.

(ah, the old days...)

So there are industries of people just buying the biggest most expensive equpiment to use for a few jobs, then chunking it???

[Bicurico]

That device is a masterpiece. It allows to monitor any reasonable RF signal transmitted up to 26GHz.

It can be used by intelligence agencies, compliance testing at R&D for new standards or by law enforcement.

For any potential use case, the price of this equipment is irrelevant.

Imagine a foreign embassy using this with proper antennas close to a government building. This is what you will be monitoring.

[tautech]

That device is a masterpiece. It allows to monitor any reasonable RF signal transmitted up to 26GHz.

As you also can with SSA5085A for just $21k.

[Bicurico]

I doubt both devices are comparable.

Also, R&S will provide it's customers with paid support and training, which Siglent customers don't get.

[coppice]

But what's driving the development of this new ever-more capable, ever more expensive equipment?  It seems like the test equipment industry is alive and well as it's ever been over the past 50 years.

The end of the cold war saw a huge decline in the expensive test equipment market. A decline few people truly recovered from. However, the need for exotic equipment for high end fibre and wireless communications has really replaced the military applications which used to drive the business, and I believe things look pretty good these days.

[Fungus]

So there are industries of people just buying the biggest most expensive equpiment to use for a few jobs, then chunking it???

Yep.

[coppice]

So there are industries of people just buying the biggest most expensive equpiment to use for a few jobs, then chunking it???

There are some eye wateringly expensive test sets for a variety of protocols, which are very specific to those protocols. Right now I imagine there are a lot of redundant LTE test systems in the market, which have been replaced by a lot of 5G test systems. If the protocols keep moving on, the equipment has to be replaced. If the protocols hang around for a long time the equipment sees a long life.

[AndyBeez]

they usually live in buildings that look like this with some crappy modern art (unmaintained) at the door

And they leave the lights switched on all through the night because, as their product cartons state, they really care about the planet.

It's all about the calibrated product support. If you are building $100M communication satellites then you are not going to use a $10 Home Depot DMM. Well, not officially. Okay, YOU go tell the management team that you're having to slash the test equipment budget because the same management team just blew all the budget on charging points for their toy Teslas

Fun fact, test equipment engineers and their families need to eat too.

[switchabl]

It's true that demand for ultra-high-end test equipment these days is driven mainly by optical and wireless communication R&D. But not this one. This is clearly built with two very specific applications in mind:
- monitoring spectrum use/tracking down interferers
- military/intelligence signal interception

[coppercone2]

I think that is paranoid nonsense.  A boss wants 1 box that does it all, always. Especially when lab space is low (always is). They also always want to expand budget for good reasons (it like the tide and you wanna be prepared).

Unless its the guy that says you don't need more then 50MHz 2 channels for digital and expects you to work till 9pm making 'adapters'

For instance, are you sure that 5.8GHz is not making a third harmonic ? This is standard stuff nowadays, especially with 5G!!!!!! are you kidding!!!

Car has 70GHz radar on it now. Do you really think a serious lab would just be happy with trusting the manufacturer that its not doing anything bad when there is all sorts of mixers and diodes in there???

For instance in a car some barely technical boss might say "well I want proof the radar is not going into the radio!!!!". You can tell him theory till you are blue in the face on the back of a ambulance but the only thing that's gonna shut that guy up is a graph!!


Big companies don't have theory based risk takers!


If you try trying to use mixers or making some attachment the totally non technical guy is gonna ask "well how did you calibrate that? what is the confidence interval on the measurement? what is temperature effect"? You might wanna say jack shit but that is NOT a valid answer in a accredited environment. Hell, they will get pissed off if the equipment is from a different manufacturer and that you need to connect two boxes with cables. How do we know that cable is good?


I don't think you ever deal with a pain in the ass before.

[nctnico]

Or take something simple like Bluetooth. FCC wants this tested for spurious up to 26.5GHz! CE radiated immunity testing goes up to 6GHz nowadays.

[coppercone2]

and then there is the guy that wants future proofing, because he has a gut feeling that the consumer standards might change in the near future and they wanna be prepared for problems!!!!

or just they wanna give the customer more confidence by extending it because he thinks people might be curious because of how that little wiggle near the end of the graph looked like it might make someone scared! You measured to 3GHz, your chinese competitor can measure it to 5GHz then you get screwed out of a sale so then preemptively it get measured to some number you think the other guy can't afford!

[Fried Chicken]

Or take something simple like Bluetooth. FCC wants this tested for spurious up to 26.5GHz! CE radiated immunity testing goes up to 6GHz nowadays.

WHat?!No way.  26.5GHz??

[KungFuJosh]

I doubt both devices are comparable.

Also, R&S will provide it's customers with paid support and training, which Siglent customers don't get.

The $380,000 price difference can buy you a LOT of training, if needed.

[NF6X]

Or take something simple like Bluetooth. FCC wants this tested for spurious up to 26.5GHz! CE radiated immunity testing goes up to 6GHz nowadays.

WHat?!No way.  26.5GHz??

Yes, really. I had to put commercial products with Bluetooth radios through FCC part 15 certification at my last job. The defense-related products I work on at my current job get tested for radiated immunity up to 40 GHz; EMC testing for a single product can cost over $50k at the outside lab.

[Fungus]

EMC testing for a single product can cost over $50k at the outside lab.

 

The other people who buy that equipment are, of course, the "outside labs".

They have to own the stuff that nobody else can afford...

[Fried Chicken]

Or take something simple like Bluetooth. FCC wants this tested for spurious up to 26.5GHz! CE radiated immunity testing goes up to 6GHz nowadays.

WHat?!No way.  26.5GHz??

Yes, really. I had to put commercial products with Bluetooth radios through FCC part 15 certification at my last job. The defense-related products I work on at my current job get tested for radiated immunity up to 40 GHz; EMC testing for a single product can cost over $50k at the outside lab.

Why test up to 40GHz?!  Are we talking emission or irradiation?

[NF6X]

Irradiation (that is, radiated susceptibility). The defense items I've had to have tested so far were only tested for emissions up to 18 GHz, but only because they weren't intentional emitters. If they had antennas, then the radiated emissions requirements would have extended up to 40 GHz.

[NF6X]

I should have written more about the why question:

For susceptibility, you don't want your electronics to get burned out, your munitions to blow up, or your life support systems to fail when you key up a nearby radio transmitter or get illuminated by a radar, whether the emitters are installed in the same vehicle or just nearby. For emissions, you don't want your electronics to jam nearby radios or radars. Everything has to play well together, while your opponents are trying to kill you at the same time.

US military items with EMC requirements are usually required to pass MIL-STD-461 requirements. It's a very tough specification to meet!

One commercial device I had to have tested as a plain old FCC part 15 device had problematic spurs from a roughly 16 MHz clock over the limit line all the way up to about 1 GHz. Those high upper limits such as 18 GHz, 26.5 GHz, and 40 GHz are there because harmonics of digital signals cause emissions problems even well beyond the 50th harmonic of the fundamental.

[KE5FX]

That device is a masterpiece. It allows to monitor any reasonable RF signal transmitted up to 26GHz.

As you also can with SSA5085A for just $21k.

On the surface, yes, this is just a $400K receiver that does the same job as any number of cheap spectrum analyzers (although I'd put it up against something like the high-end Signal Hound models if I wanted to economize.)  But you're paying for the software apps along with the hardware. 

Also, the ESMD is preselected, all the way down to 8 kHz apparently.  If your neighborhood 3-letter agency hooks up their quarter-mile rhombic or Sterba curtain or whatever to the antenna jack, or if the Navy uses it onboard a ship with a powerful radar antenna within rock-throwing distance, the ESMD will still work, while they won't find enough pieces of the spectrum analyzer to send back for warranty repair.

Preselection and crunchproof front ends are no joke, particularly at HF-UHF frequencies where you can't just throw a YIG filter or two at it.  This box would probably be half the price if its tuning range could start at 1 GHz rather than 8 kHz.