Saturday, November 22, 2014

Goodbye, Tektronix

     Fear not, at least for the short term: Tek is still around.  Okay, fear a little: I'm not sure how serious they are about staying around.

     Tek's flat-rate price to repair and calibrate [REQUIRED TEST DEVICE]: $10,500.00
     Tek's price for a new [REQUIRED TEST DEVICE]:  Well north of...........$20,000.00
     Competing, functional-equivalent [REQUIRED TEST DEVICE], Brand A...$7,000.00
     Competing, functional-equivalent [REQUIRED TEST DEVICE], Brand B...$5,000.00
     Competing, functional-equivalent [REQUIRED TEST DEVICE], Brand B'..$4,995.00

     Our dear old [REQUIRED TEST DEVICE] is broken.  I don't think it will be going back to Tek for repair.  Sure, Tek is good stuff -- but the days when LaVoie could clone one by going just a wee bit cheaper on components are long gone.  Every one of these instruments is one input converter/signal processing board and a big old chunk of software, plugged into an entirely conventional computer.  Our [REQUIRED TEST DEVICE] still runs Windows 95, Tek not making updates readily available (see prices above).  I'll miss it.  It's a neat little package, a rack-mount touchscreen computer with a tiny wee screen about 9" wide. 

     Dear Tek: remember when what my employers do was essentially a license to print money?  Those days are gone.  It doesn't look like they'll be back soon.  We can't drop this kind of money on stuff so far into the technobackground that management will never, ever see it nor understand exactly what it does for them.

     Sic transit gloria geektopia.

11 comments:

Alien said...

This smells like Tek was bought a few years back by someone who regarded it as a money farm, not knowing or understanding what it did, how it did it, or what goes on in the industries it served; buy it, mine it, move on.

Any idea who owns the corpse?

Ed Skinner said...

Does the parts list for [REQUIRED TEST DEVICE] still include "W1 - Wizard"? That's how you know it's really from Tektronics.

Ed Skinner said...

Oh, wait. You said "Tek" - is that different? (Need more coffee in AZ.)

Roberta X said...

Same, same.

Ed Skinner said...

I've got an old school Tektronix 2465 4-channel, 300 MHz scope that I use occasionally on radios and such. Picked it up for $300 a couple of years ago and it's accurate enough for working on ham radios and such. But there was no schematic with it so I haven't gone looking for the wizard in the parts list. I also seem to recall there was often a doodle -- a race car driving along one of the signal lines or a hot air balloon floating above some component -- but I don't know if that was an always, common or rare practice. Regardless, they made good stuff that lasts.

Old NFO said...

Yep, they've pretty much priced themselves out of existence... When you can do the same thing with a laptop and software...

Douglas2 said...

There's a bunch of that in my field. Software, A-to-D converter with dock-connector, and iPad together cost less than the hardware test equipment from the traditional supplier.
The hitch in my case is convincing management that the iPad is part of the test kit, and not to be borrowed on whim for some other purpose.

Dave In Indiana said...

That happens in pretty much all industries. Cincinnati Milacron was once the Cadillac of the machine tool industry, both in quality and price. Then back in the '80's the Japanese manufacturers came on the scene selling like equipment for a fraction of the cost. Cincinnati is no more.
Price is king. If it does everything the expensive brand does and the check comes from your account, which would you choose? I bet Tek employed that same philosophy when making capital purchases too.

Anonymous said...

If you feel like taking a chance, you can buy Tektronics oscilloscopes in lots of 50 from the government liquidators. The DoD is dumping all of them (or they were through last year.)

You see them turn up at places like Hamvention, in the parking lot.

Not sure if your [required test device] is more involved or not... but the DoD might be dumping them as well.

Anonymous said...

Didn't Tek just merge with/buy/get bought by somebody, a couple of years ago?
Try Transcat.Sales dept. is so-so, repair & calibration depts. are pretty good.

markm said...

How old is that Tek? I don't do much RF work anymore, but ten or fifteen years ago I was shopping for a spectrum analyzer. New mostly-digital instruments cost substantially less than used reconditioned mostly-analog instruments. The new ones had better specs and were easier to use, and the annual calibration estimates I was getting indicated that even if we already had a good analog instrument, scrapping it and buying new would pay off in three years. This was not just one brand, but every brand that wasn't adding bells and whistles to even their most basic model to justify keeping the price up.

I think you said that your "old" instrument is mostly-digital, so not that old. I don't know if that trend continued as computers became faster and cheaper, and more of the analog front end could be absorbed into digital circuits and software, but I would not be surprised if the cost reduction trend continued. And that puts old-line companies with a high overhead such as Tek or HP/Agilent/Keysight in a bind - they can't live on selling digitizers+software for ~$1K, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to add enough features to justify >$10K prices. Or to find customers that need all those features enough to drop a small fortune...