On Monday, March 21, 2005 Harold B. Mandel wrote:
>
> In the 'phone world, it seems that no one owns anything anymore. The
> technology changes so fast that obsolete test equipment piles up
> faster than the revenue that pays for it.
>
The "obsolete" test equipment that flooded the surplus market about 12
years ago when the defense contractors went bust was a goldmine for those of
us who were (and still are) doing consulting work. I became a regular in
the local auction circuit for a few years and managed to gather every piece
of test equipment I needed to do design work from DC to 12GHz. I suspect
that Tucker and other used equipment dealers are finding the disposed
"obsolete" telecomm equipment being disposed of currently to be of similar
value.
In one place where I worked, we had a technician who would regularly and
intentionally blow out the front ends of HP141T spectrum analyzers so as to
force the company to buy newer equipment. The response from management was
"So what?". The place was sold off for a loss shortly after I left for what
seemed at the time to be greener pastures but which proved to be even worse.
I've seen two startups that owned no test equipment at all, one of which
presented itself as the world's leader in high speed communications
encription technology. If they needed even a BER tester, they would only
resort to borrowing one under the quise of evaluating it. That place was
sold and then gutted by the buyer who only wanted the intellectual property.
I get the impression that a good number of these "leading technology"
telecomm outfits are of similar nature, and are only interested in the
short-term prospects, a trend which has turned the wireless industry into
the next dotcom investment scandal. They rarely own any equipment, and any
that they do have is usually leased so as to limit the amount of capital
investment at risk when the place folds.
Chris
,----------------------. High Performance Mixers and
/ What's all this \ Amplifiers for RF Communications
/ extinct stuff, anyhow? /
\ _______,--------------' Chris Trask / N7ZWY
_ |/ Principal Engineer
oo\ Sonoran Radio Research
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