There was no bidding. It looks like a BIN or BO.

I'd guess a Cal Lab needed it for a specific job and that item was speced
in a contract.

FWIW,

-John

=================

In message CAE6XXrg7Br3kw7EFCEipLWoyV3OHU36MLWcBjiJW7wREHT=WSQ@mail.gmail.com
, Will writes:

That is a very typical used price for the 4-way Datron references if
you look at used eq dealers.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG        | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer      | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

This is the point I was trying to make a couple of days ago.

The unit may be called out in some test proceedure for something that
requires continuing support. Not all military systems use the latest iToy.
The B-52s are at least 50 years old, as are Atlas SLVs. It's the same in
industry.

If your standard fails, you have some not very good choices:

You can scrap the entire system and replace everything. But are you really
going to get approved for a project to essentially start from scratch to
support a legacy system?  Probably not. AQnd does anybody alive even know
what has to be done?

You can just throw everything away and go paint houses or something.

You can pay through the nose, and hope it lasts a few more years profitably.

Years ago, I designed some hardware for a local computer graphics company.
The company president, a very determined guy, INSISTED I use a half-UART
in the product, a Motorola MC 2257 I think, because at the time the
half-UART was a few cents cheaper than the industry standard AY5-1013.

Well, the thing went into production and Motorola discontinued the chip.
He wound up paying about $25 each, because the part was designed in. So
much for aardvaark parts.

There's a couple of lessons there.

-John

==================

The $4300 Datron went to India. Seems to be a hobbyist with very deep
pockets rather than someone starting a cal lab. He has bought a huge
amount of expensive (overprised?) stuff in just a few months.

http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback2&userid=manic_t&ftab=AllFeedback&myworld=true

I don't know if there is a way to show all descriptions of his
purchases on the same page. I just selected "wiew item" to see the
details of each purchase. I should ask my friend who taught me Ebay
basics (or at least tried). Now I know how to search current and ended
listings...

2012/2/20, J. Forster jfor@quikus.com:

About 2 years ago I bought a Datron 4910 for about $950 on eBay. It
arrived with three broken banana jacks (replacements must be very
carefully chosen). It had too much electrical noise on all four of the
the cells and the cell voltages were not stable.  It had several broken
wires in the battery circuits. The original batteries needed to be
replaced with a size  that is presently available and the new batteries
have more capacity too ($160).

The noise problems were resolved  by replacing several faulty power
supply electrolytic caps and a number of tantalum caps on the
motherboard and in each of the cell assemblies. The banana jacks were
obtained from a Datron 4912 that I bought for parts ($500). I moved the
cell from the 4912 to the cell 1 position in the 4910 to take care of a
slightly increased voltage instability over cells 2  through four.

At this point I ran the unit for many weeks using a 3458a and logging
all the data to my computer one output at a time. The 4910 it remained
well within specs so I sent the unit to Fluke for Z540 calibration with
data. The Fluke tech found that I had an intermittent short from the LOW
jacks to ground so I picked the unit up to repair it. It turned out that
the screw for the M/B regulator was intermittently shorting to the
anodized power supply case. It was a factory assembly problem that was
duplicated in my 4912 as well!

I took the unit back to Fluke and this time the calibration with data
went just fine. I just picked up my 4910 last week and am trying to get
my switch software to do it's thing.. My short term goal is to be able
to constantly monitor my 4910 and 4912 outputs and to be able to do
accurate comparisons with other portable standards.

I have quite a bit of my time working on the 4910  and the data system
as well as some outlay for calibration that can be reduced drastically
if highest accuracy for the 4910 is not needed. I wanted to be able to
calibrate my 3458a which should be linear to 0.1 ppm. I checked the
3458a with my Fluke 720 to 0.2 ppm at many points so it is working quite
well.

Charlie

On 3/7/2012 3:30 PM, Will wrote: