[volt-nuts] Ye Olde HP3458A

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <87y5z97jwe.fsf at devereux.me.uk>, John Devereux writes:

>What are peoples opinions on the likelihood of a newer model coming out
>soon?

p=0.

Read the HP Journal article carefully, and you will realize that if
you want to build a DVM an order of magnitude better than the 3458
it will have connectors for both "power" and "helium", because such
a instrument will crash directly into the thermal noise.

The only place where you could drastically improve on the Hp3458,
is the two internal references, and this is where much of the
"value add" of Flukes 8508a comes from.

I am somewhat dubious if we will ever see compact high-temperature
superconductor based josephson voltage references and quantum resistance
standards, but if they appear on the market, it would be pretty trivial
to retrofit a HP3458 with them, provided they can fit in the box.

The other argument for buying an HP3458A is that it is a much more
interesting instrument to play with, up to and including downloading
and running your own M68k programs on it.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at 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.