With all that's going on in the financial sector, I imagine that you'll soon experience budget cuts. I also wonder if there will be a run on companies buying equipment beofre the end of the year. Engineering equipment budgets after run out on December 31, so there's often a flurry of equipment putchases in December. Do you expect to buy equipment on the belief that budgets with shrink next year?

Aside from equipment-budget cuts, do you see other budget cuts coming? By that I mean engineering jobs.

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The International System of Units (SI), defines the meter as the basic unit of length, but perhaps the Smoot would be preferable.

Fifty years ago this week, the world added another basic measurement to a long list of measurements: the Smoot. Named for Oliver Smoot, the unit defines the length of the Massachusetts Ave. Bridge, which runs from MIT on the Cambridge side of the Charles River to Boston. On a cold night in 1958 several of Smoot's fraternity brothers used him to mark the length of the bridge. When the bridge was rebuilt is was remarked in smoots. Read about the Smoot and the ceremony marking its 50th anniversary.

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During my last summer of college, I worked for a power-supply company characterizing transistors with a curve tracer. Curve tracers are no longer manufactured, and engineers now either use a source-measure unit (SMU) or they build their own with a computer, a power supply, and a DMM. What have you done when you needed a system to characterize devices for DC characteristics? Have you purchased an SMU or built your own system? If you bought, what tipped the scales that way? If you built your own system, did you save money? How long did you spend programming the system? Whichever decision you made, was it the right one? Or, perhaps you found a curve tracer, either in some back room or on eBay, that you use instead.

Feel free to comment or send e-mail to m.rowe@tmworld.com.

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After reading "Mosquito control" in the TMW September print issue, Jiri Polivka of Spaceklabs writes:

...Read More

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In the latest issue of "The Best Test Newsletter," Louis Ungar writes:

"While avionics boxes MUST be properly tested and supported, cell phones and computers can be tossed in the trash when they stop working - especially if that occurs a couple of years after they become state-of-the-art.  For manufacturers of commercial high tech, test is not a support function.  It is merely a way to check whether the manufacturing process created defects - Yes or No.  Even if it turns out that the test incorrectly makes this determination, exchanging a faulty unit for a new one, generally is an acceptable solution.  This leaves test engineers feeling unnecessary and often unwanted.  With the high unemployment and housing crisis, test engineers who work do not want to rock ...Read More

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The Champlain Valley (Vermont) Exhibition, which runs until August 31, has many of the usual things you'd expect to find at a country fair--rides, junk food, and farm animals. What I didn't expect to find is an artist who makes achitectural sculpture out of clay. John Brickels, shown in the photo, makes mechanical sculptures from clay that include some electronics. The sculpture in the photo has three vacuum tubes that light up.

Vacuum tubes?

John Brickels creating a mechanical sculpture from clay,
with vacuum tubes on top.

Brickels doesn't actually apply power to the tubes, for that would r...Read More

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I'm writing this during a technical session at the 2008 IEEE EMC Symposium in Detroit. This year, the Symposium added  a spectial session called "Recent Advances of Jitter and BER Analysis in High-Speed  Serial Links." The  session, which includes six papers, is in addition to the recently added sessions on signal integrity (SI has two technical session this year). The papers presented in the jitter session shows how digital phenomena now affects a product's EMC. EMC engineers may not realize that data patterns can affect EMC, and the presenters have shown that using something that EMC engineers understand: a spectrum scan. A plot clearly showed the difference in emissions when different data patterns in communication links occur.

...Read More

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At last week's NCSL International Workshop and Symposium, Chris Grachanen was awarded the NCSLI Education & Training award (*) for his contributions to metrology education. Grachanen, Master Engineer/Operations Manager, Houston Metrology Group at Hewlett-Packard (Houston, TX) has been outspoken in his advocacy to make metrology, the science of measurement, a standard occupation by the U.S. Government and to point out the shortage of trained metrology and calibration people.

On Tuesday, August 5, Grachanen chaired a techical session on calibration training at the NCSLI Symposium. That session brought to light the reasons that the metrology community is facing a shortage of qualified people. Richard Brenia of Southern California Edison noted that the mility isn't training as many calibration technicians as in the past. Technicians with calibration training use their ski...Read More

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The August print issue of T&MW features a new column called "Test Ideas." For this first test idea, I took one that was submitted to our sister publication, EDN. The idea is "Sync sine waves over three decades" and it shows you how to design an audio-frequency sine wave generator with three ICs. The author had submitted the circuit for publication in EDN's popular "Design Ideas" column.

Because of publishing schedules, I've had to use two more circuits submitted to EDN Design Ideas as Test Ideas for the September and October issues. In fact, I need to edit a test idea for November soon. Because of the nature of Design Ideas, submissions always involve schematics and often, source code. But, I don't want Test Ideas to look like an exten...Read More

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While visiting a company for an upcoming T&MW print article, I heard an engineer talk about high-end oscilloscope probes as being "disposable." Now, oscilloscope companies march through the T&MW offices on a regular basis, showing their latest and greatest. Often, the companies introduce probes for their oscilloscopes, especially the high-bandwidth models. These probes are expensive (in the thousands of dollars) and, according to this engineer, easily broken. "We don't treat oscilloscope probes as capital expenditures because they don't last three years," he told me. He considers probes  as consumables, like pencils but more expensive.

Do you regularly break probes or other expensive items? What else do you regularly discard? WHat about low-end equipment such as multimeters, are they disposable? What can others do to prevent breakages and...Read More

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Here's more proof that engineers use technology long after it's out of fashion. A participant in the Agilent VEE e-mail user group mentioned that he had just upgraded several test systems from Windows 98 to Windows XP. I assume that his company has a site license for XP, given that Microsoft won't sell it anymore.

I used my Windows 98 PC at home for seven years. I still keep it as a backup computer. Win98 was perhaps Microsoft's best operating system (second edition, that is).

Are you still running Windows 98? If you are, good for you.

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