4 ms·
Low unit test equipment is always expensive, see also: Oscilloscopes, Spec Analyzers, etc. You just don't see the volume that makes economies of scale kick in
by vvanders 10y ago
Low unit test equipment is always expensive, see also: Oscilloscopes, Spec Analyzers, etc.
You just don't see the volume that makes economies of scale kick in over your NRE(non-recurring engineering) costs.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoI would hope that this type of hardware can be offset by the fact that these devices don't suffer obsolescence the same way other digital devices do, which need to be replaced because there's no longer 802.11b networks around etc.
- karthikb 10y agoIn many ways they're worse, especially specialized test equipment and protocol analyzers, because they're designed to evaluate the very thing that goes obsolete.
- pjc50 10y agoYes and no. At work we have a scope that will let you save traces onto a 1.44Mb floppy disk. Other people have test gear that runs DOS or Windows XP.
- vvanders 10y agoThere's also the issue of calibration and recertification. Some industries can skip it but I'm guessing it's a hard requirement in the medical field.
- sofaofthedamned 10y agoGood point. I used to work at a mobile startup that subsequently got acquired and burned - the run rate for a company of ~140 people was astronomical. Radio engineers are expensive and rare, scopes and even faraday cages are expensive, specialist software is expensive, handsets were a fortune when you had to buy hundreds of them. We got sold for (I think) about $330 million, then you look at social media startups that go for a couple of billion. Nobody wants to do stuff that changes the world for a reason.
- outworlder 10y agoAnd yet oscilloscopes went down in price by a lot in the past couple of decades.
- rasz_pl 10y ago1 gig sampling scope is $250 there days