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>an oscilloscope that costs 3x the value of your car on a trade show floor

Typical high end microwave measurement system cost as much as a Ferrari car.

Good cable and connectors can set you back by several thousand dollars.

It's a very good business space prime for disruption (hint SDR - or software-defined radio).

Fun facts, the grand daddy of Silicon Valley start-up is HP (then Agilent, and now Keysight) selling function signal generator.




Good cable and connectors can set you back by several thousand dollars.

Another domain where that is true involves logic analyzers. A few years ago, on a bit of a lark, I bought a (used) fairly high-end Keysight logic analyzer. The kind of thing that cost like $20,000 or more when it was brand new. But I got a sweet deal on it, so I bought it. Only... it came with no test leads. And then I started shopping for the leads.

Yikes.

I forget the exact numbers now, but as best as I can recall, the leads came in 64pin sets, where the device supported up to 4 test lead sets, for 256 total channels. And just one of the 64pin test lead sets cost something like $1500. So a full set would cost another $6000 on top of the device itself. I think that was about what I paid for the analyzer itself in the first place!

Now I don't regret buying it and in truth I never needed to use 256 channels anyway, so I only bought 1 of the test lead sets so far. But yeah... test leads / cables /etc. for high bandwidth / low latency / high frequency applications get pretty damn expensive.


I've got a rack of equipment that sometimes requires a special calibration where I need to lug over a signal generator. Of course the only ones we have available that go to the necessary frequency weigh like 50lbs. I've recently been eyeing a little gadget that costs about 1/10 or 1/20 the cost of the Keysight units, interfaces using USB oe Ethernet, and is about the size of a deck of cards. The accuracy isn't perfect on its own but that's what a 10MHz ref clock is for. It's amazing how far tech has come and it's amazing how much we are still paying for these dinosaur pieces of test equipment.


Interesting. Though he didn't say what kind of car he drives, it could be a real shitter


2007 Toyota Camry. I looked it up, it's actually worth even less than I thought it was haha.




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