On Fri, 22 Apr 2005 23:50:26 -0700, Watson A.Name - "Watt Sun, the Dark
Remover" wrote:
"Jim Thompson" wrote in message
[snip]

But I've had a bias against hp equipment for at least 30 years... a
whole lot of it was crap or became crap within one year. When I ran the
Phoenix Analog Design Center for GenRad I forbade the purchase of hp
'scopes.

But their scopes always took a back seat to Tek, so if they didn't want to
flush money down the toilet, they would not have bothered to invest the
money to make and sell a scope that was competetive with Tek.

However I used a HP 1741 back in '79, and I thought it was a solid scope.
It was a blessing after rubbing my fingers raw from turning the timebase
and other knobs 100's of times a day on a Tek toob scope. The HP probably
saved the company tons of money on electric and air conditioning costs by
getting rid of those old Tek toob scopes, which used a half a kilowatt of
power all day long.

HP dumped their REALLY crap scopes on the military. The worst scope I
ever tried to use was an HP in a waterproof AGE[1] box. Not only did it
have the legendary "can't trigger" problem that's endemic to HP scopes,
but the waterproof knobs gave new meaning to the term "backlash."

But then again, the only thing I could honestly testify to re HP test
equipment is they never got the triggering as good as Tek. All of their
other stuff was, as we all know, essentially perfect.

Cheers!
Rich

[1] Aerospace Ground Equipment