[time-nuts] Warning if buying from directly from Agilent via eBay with Paypal.

David Kirkby david.kirkby at onetel.net
Sat Nov 17 17:40:35 UTC 2012


On 17 November 2012 14:31, Tom Holmes <tholmes at woh.rr.com> wrote:
> I would strongly suggest that you consider buying Agilent Certi-Prime items
> not through EBay but through one of the distributors that they now sell much
> of their equipment through.

The discounts on eBay (48% was agreed, prior to my adding a couple of
more options), were much better than on the Agilent web site (35%). I
don't know how much I would have got off of other dealers, but quotes
I've had on other equipment have been quite small discounts (5%) from
the Agilent web site.

> I have dealt with Electro-Rent on this kind of
> equipment and had much better response and less hassle if there are
> problems. I don't know if E-R operates in the UK, but I suspect that there
> is an equivalent there.

Microlease is one such place in the UK. A friend of mine has suggested
to me Livingston Hire, which mainly hire kit, buy my friend said
Cellnet used to get a better discount from Livingsone than they did
from Agilent. I've not tried contacting them yet.

> Sorry to hear you had trouble with the FieldFox as I am considering one
> myself.

In the 2-3 weeks I had the FieldFox, I discovered a large number of
firmware bugs. Agilent agreed several were bugs, and others were
submitted as requests for enhancements. Some of the bugs were so
obvious - like the firmware version mine was shipped with, would not
interface to a computer. That was not just a newly discovered bug, but
had been documented in the release notes and was the "stable" release
for some time. That was until Agilent discovered it had a bug which
could give the wrong results under some conditions, so it was pulled
from the Agilent web site.

If you do get a FieldFox, the "QuickCal" is a nice option to have. It
is not as accurate as a mechanical calibration kit, but still good,
and very convenient. If the highest accuracy is not required, you just
leave the cable open with an N,APC-7 or whatever connector you
specify, and it does the cal from just the open connector. For better
performance with a DUT which reflects very little, then a load is
needed too, but that does not need to be a good quality load. For the
very best performance, you need a mecanical cal kit.

I paid for all the options, which with hindsight was not such a clever
idea. If you do buy a FieldFox, I think I'd at least try to get a
trial of the options for a few weeks - they can be time-limited. There
are no hardware options - the hardware is there, but it needs to be
enabled by software.

I think several of the options are really aimed at technicians, who
might have limited knowledge, as they just present information in a
different way to which one can read off the S-parameters. For example,
the vector-voltmeter, which is not a high impedance voltmeter as you
might assume, but just gives a big display of the loss and electrical
length of a bit of cable. Great big numbers, very easy to read, but
actually showing you nothing you can't simly read off the S paramters.

There's an option for antennas (I forget what it is called) which
gives a time-domain response, to find faults in cables. That really
tells you nothing the TDR option does not tell you. But the TDR option
is a lot more capable (and a lot more expensive). But it is a bit
pointless having both.


> Tom Holmes, N8ZM
> Tipp City, OH
> EM79

Thanks Tom,

Dave



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