Ed Price wrote:

Designing and building a product to provide many years of use, and then
capable of being repaired without access to unique components and/or exotic
service equipment, is a concept so rare as to be thought a scam.

Ed
wb6wsn


Imagine your cell phone if it was designed to be repaired, and used only
common components. It would be the size of a briefcase. Do you think
cell phones would be popular if they had to be briefcase sized?

What about spectrum analyzers that needed to be contained in several
6 foot high rack cabinets?

Is the world better or worse now that a 100MHz oscilloscope can be made
the size of a paper back book?

-Chuck, WA3UQV

Chuck Harris wrote:

Ed Price wrote:

Designing and building a product to provide many years of use, and then
capable of being repaired without access to unique components and/or exotic
service equipment, is a concept so rare as to be thought a scam.

Ed
wb6wsn


Imagine your cell phone if it was designed to be repaired, and used only
common components. It would be the size of a briefcase. Do you think
cell phones would be popular if they had to be briefcase sized?

What about spectrum analyzers that needed to be contained in several
6 foot high rack cabinets?

Is the world better or worse now that a 100MHz oscilloscope can be made
the size of a paper back book?

-Chuck, WA3UQV

Most of the chips in cell phones are off the shelf parts, and there
are places that do repair cell phones. RMS Communications in Ocala,
Florida rebuilds thousands of pagers and cell phones every week. I know
several techs who worked there, and they were telling me about the
equipment they had available at each work station.


One problem with new RF and test equipment is the firmware programmed
into chips isn't readily available to program replacement parts. Another
problem is the short production life for some parts. If you build a
product for over two years, you either do "Lifetime purchases", or
redesign boards to use the next round of parts. What is real fun is a
base product with up to 100 different sets of software, depending on the
customers specifications. Its hard enough to keep it straight on the
factory floor, let alone trying to do it in the field.
--


Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

"Bill Turner" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 15 Nov 2003 19:15:09 -0600, "jakdedert"
wrote:

No, there is no person so named. Would you prefer that he had used the
sort
of expletives that those symbols generally represent? Have you never
seen
profanity annotated that way (think: comic strip)?

I've never seen "465" included in symbolic profanity before. Remove
that and the rest becomes recognizable.

Didn't notice that...finger must've slipped off the shift key.


The 'Sanford & Son'
reference was made by the service rep, apparently referring to the gall
of
the OP, for wasting the rep's valuable time asking for information about
equipment that he (the rep) considered to be nothing but junk (you'll
recall
the TV series of that name was about a junk dealer).

Pretty obscure, but makes sense now.

Does that wrap it up for you...or--OP--did I get that right?

Got it all, thanks. Plain 'ol English beats speaking in tongues though.
Actually, this was kind of fun. Maybe we should all start posting with
obscure references and irregular grammar. Not.

Glad to be of service. Actually I think the obscure reference was actually
a paraphrased quotation of the service rep, which the OP repeated...probably
should have used quote marks there to clear it up.

jak
--
Bill, W6WRT

Michael A. Terrell wrote:


Most of the chips in cell phones are off the shelf parts, and there
are places that do repair cell phones. RMS Communications in Ocala,
Florida rebuilds thousands of pagers and cell phones every week. I know
several techs who worked there, and they were telling me about the
equipment they had available at each work station.

Most of the parts in a tek scope are off the shelf too, but like the
cell phone, there are one or two show stoppers. For the cell phone,
it is the microprocessor with its combination mask and flash
programming.

I know a guy that repairs pagers, but you cannot convince me that it
is a profitable business.... The way he moaned about the cost of my
fixing his RF signal generator gives me a clue.

One problem with new RF and test equipment is the firmware programmed
into chips isn't readily available to program replacement parts. Another
problem is the short production life for some parts. If you build a
product for over two years, you either do "Lifetime purchases", or
redesign boards to use the next round of parts. What is real fun is a
base product with up to 100 different sets of software, depending on the
customers specifications. Its hard enough to keep it straight on the
factory floor, let alone trying to do it in the field.

It is even worse in the space field, where by the time a part is
qualified, and a satellite is made, the part is stone cold obsolete.

-Chuck

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003 23:30:40 -0800, "Ed Price"
wrote:

Designing and building a product to provide many years of use, and then
capable of being repaired without access to unique components and/or exotic
service equipment, is a concept so rare as to be thought a scam.

Can anyone recommend a decent commercial vector network analyser and
spectrum analyser that one can repair oneself if necessary and
hopefully keep them up and running for ever?
--

"I expect history will be kind to me, since I intend to write it."
- Winston Churchill

Chuck Harris wrote in message ...
Michael A. Terrell wrote:


Most of the chips in cell phones are off the shelf parts, and there
are places that do repair cell phones. RMS Communications in Ocala,
Florida rebuilds thousands of pagers and cell phones every week. I know
several techs who worked there, and they were telling me about the
equipment they had available at each work station.

Most of the parts in a tek scope are off the shelf too, but like the
cell phone, there are one or two show stoppers. For the cell phone,
it is the microprocessor with its combination mask and flash
programming.

I know a guy that repairs pagers, but you cannot convince me that it
is a profitable business.... The way he moaned about the cost of my
fixing his RF signal generator gives me a clue.

One problem with new RF and test equipment is the firmware programmed
into chips isn't readily available to program replacement parts. Another
problem is the short production life for some parts. If you build a
product for over two years, you either do "Lifetime purchases", or
redesign boards to use the next round of parts. What is real fun is a
base product with up to 100 different sets of software, depending on the
customers specifications. Its hard enough to keep it straight on the
factory floor, let alone trying to do it in the field.

It is even worse in the space field, where by the time a part is
qualified, and a satellite is made, the part is stone cold obsolete.

-Chuck


hmm, kind of like buying a computer ...in a few mounths it is
obsolete...on the tektroix and hp stuff.......you would think that
they would be feeling the heat from asia like everyone else.....just
how much profit is there in a unit that sells new for $75,000.00? and
why may i ask after 10 to 15 years it still sells for heavy cash....

"Ed Price" wrote in message news:nO_tb.9428$cX1.8536@fed1read02...
"gw" wrote in message
om...
Roy Lewallen wrote in message
...
Thanks to Ed for the good advice.

I've got an HP 140T. As far as I know, the only difference between it
and the 141T is that the CRT in mine is a conventional one with
long-persistence phosphor rather than a storage tube. It uses the same
plug-in units as the 141T. I find it to be very usable, and don't really
miss storage capability at all. I think the tube is a lot more
trouble-free than a storage type unit.

So I recommend that you don't turn down a 140T if you come across one --
and you might even have a better chance of getting a unit with a working
display than with a 141T.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Ed Price wrote:

[Lots of good advice]


well it is amazing i think how some of these units retain their resale
value even though the companies that made them do not service them or
back them......man who was the brainiac that thought about how to
implement this scam?

Designing and building a product to provide many years of use, and then
capable of being repaired without access to unique components and/or exotic
service equipment, is a concept so rare as to be thought a scam.

Ed
wb6wsn

well ed what are your thoughts on a hp 8590? bueno o no bueno?

gw wrote:

hmm, kind of like buying a computer ...in a few mounths it is
obsolete...on the tektroix and hp stuff.......you would think that
they would be feeling the heat from asia like everyone else.....just
how much profit is there in a unit that sells new for $75,000.00? and
why may i ask after 10 to 15 years it still sells for heavy cash....


When you look at the price of a $75,000 unit, consider this: First,
the test equipment market is really rather small, nothing like the
consumer electronics market, and second, bleeding edge technology
test equipment requires some serious money to develop. Tektronix
and HP have historically been positioned right in the front of the
technology wave. So, a unit that sells for $75,000 may have cost
$20 million to develop to where it could be manufactured. It
probably only has a market life of 1000 units. Then the actual
manufacture of the product costs something. A good round figure
is the ratio of parts cost to sale price is 3x to 4x. Labor figures
in at about equal to parts cost.


-20,000,000 to develop
-25,000 x 1000 units = -25,000,000 parts cost
-25,000 x 1000 units = -25,000,000 labor cost
75,000 x 1000 units = +75,000,000 sales price of instrument
-------------------------------------------------------------
Bottom line +$5,000,000

Take that $5 million, and subtract some for advertising, and service,
and you haven't got much left.

Granted these numbers are just guesses, but I have been doing small
quantity manufacture for a lot of years, and these kinds of ratios
come up again and again.


As to why the Tektronix and HP stuff commands a high price in the
used market, the reason is simple, the gear is high quality, has
very high capabilities, and the price of a new replacement is also
high.

-Chuck

Chuck Harris wrote:

I know a guy that repairs pagers, but you cannot convince me that it
is a profitable business.... The way he moaned about the cost of my
fixing his RF signal generator gives me a clue.

-Chuck

Believe what you want, but the place has around 100 employees, and
was looking at buying the old L3-Com/Microdyne complex to expand into
its 120,000+ square feet of buildings and acres of land for parking.

They are bigger than Microdyne was when it closed the complex and
moved to Pennsylvania. If there is no money in repairing pager and cell
phones, why do they want to buy property which is priced at 1.6 million
dollars? Here is the listing for the complex:
http://www.foxfirerealty.com/showlis...tid=17779&id=2
--


Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

I'm not trying to be difficult Michael. The reason I have trouble
seeing how this is a money making venture is the low price of
cell phones and pagers. When a Cell phone lists for $99, how much
time can a technician really spend fixing it?

In the repair business, the maximum repair price you can charge a
customer has to be less than 40% of the cost of new, or they will
always walk away. If they walk away, and give you their phones for
free, then perhaps you could make a little bit fixing it and selling
it, but really, now, tracphone sells refurbished nokia 5185i's for
$39. There is not much margine in that.

Who pays for the time necessary for the technician to open the phone,
diagnose the problem, unsolder the offending module, test the phone,
reassemble, and pack? You would have to pay your technicians less
than $10 per hour!

-Chuck

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Chuck Harris wrote:

I know a guy that repairs pagers, but you cannot convince me that it
is a profitable business.... The way he moaned about the cost of my
fixing his RF signal generator gives me a clue.

-Chuck


Believe what you want, but the place has around 100 employees, and
was looking at buying the old L3-Com/Microdyne complex to expand into
its 120,000+ square feet of buildings and acres of land for parking.

They are bigger than Microdyne was when it closed the complex and
moved to Pennsylvania. If there is no money in repairing pager and cell
phones, why do they want to buy property which is priced at 1.6 million
dollars? Here is the listing for the complex:
http://www.foxfirerealty.com/showlis...tid=17779&id=2