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Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler
Calibration is an interesting minefield.
A general certificate of calibration simply means that an instrument was checked on a specified date and was found to comply with its manufacturer's specifications.
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Which I why I say, it needs to be calibrated at intervals. So that there is a trend and then there can no longer be the uncertainty that it was only fine on that one day you first had it calibrated.
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Thereafter, several things go wrong:
1) The couriers bounce the thing down several flight of stairs on its way home from the cal lab. Maybe this affects the accuracy, maybe it doesn't. How lucky do you feel?
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This issue isn't exclusive to calibration, but you can take it there yourself.
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2) Once home, most users see the cal certificate and then treat the instrument as gospel, ignoring or unaware of the allowable amounts of error specified by the manufacturer.
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Some, not most, certainly not all.
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3) Most users ignore or are unaware of the specified uncertainties of the cal lab they used.
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Some, not most, certainly not all.
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Originally Posted by G0HZU_JMR
Sorry to continue to be a neghead but I agree with all the above based on experience at work. We have some really nice test gear (and lots of it) but calibration is generally seen as a necessary business requirement and not something to look forward to.
The test gear (for calibration) usually goes in the back of a transit van for a couple of days then you have to hope and pray the cal house don't actually find the need to take the gear apart and meddle with it. I think it is usually away for a couple of weeks but I don't know for sure. But for at least two days it will be subject to a free shock and vibration test in the back of a transit van.
Sometimes the gear comes back scratched or damaged. My nearly 30 year old Fluke DMM at work came back with a damaged display last year from Trescal. It wasn't worth the time/cost of complaining but I've used that DMM all my time at this company. So I was quite upset about this. The fact they can take it away, calibrate it and trash the display and then deliver it back unpacked yet visibly damaged tells you all you need to know about how much your test gear is cared for at these places.
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I'd say those who see calibration as only a business requirement probably don't understand it at all.
With regards to your feelings of cal centres, I guess it depends on the cal centres, the people you choose.
We would have a company come to us and calibrate our gear, they were good, nothing got damaged. They'd come to us due to the amount of gear we had, they'd do three days here.