Very strange, but good...

[Nick]

   

Very strangely, this just turned up...

I left Dubai over a year ago. Last week, my old office reception refused to accept a parcel for me from Aramex (the Middle East's version of DHL) as I no longer worked there. However, one of my old team very kindly let me know about this, and I chased Aramex - all they knew was that it came via one of their forwarding addresses in New York with my destination code on it.

They sent me a photo of the dispatch label - it was from Agilent/Keysight/HP! I was interested!

So I rang the number on the label in NY - they confirmed it was for me, but from some other part of Keysight, probably in Malaysia...

Aramex wouldn't sent the parcel to me in the UK (they would only deliver in Dubai), so an old friend in Dubai very kindly took delivery of it and then forwarded it to me in the UK by DHL. It arrived this morning...

I have absolutely no idea why Keysight sent this to me, but I'm right chuffed! A really really superb meter.

I also have a U1253B, so really should only keep one... EEVBLOG prefer the U1272A over the Fluke 87V, so maybe it'll be that one...
   

[Mike Watterson]

You often need two meters. Current and volts at the same time. Or input and output volts at the same time. Sometimes three meters at once.
So keep it and enjoy. At least they are not like the HP printers division. It won't secretly update the firmware and then stop working with the cartridges already in it. The test gear people ought to have had the old HP name and the PC & Printers people should have had a new name that reflects their whatever. My first laptop in maybe 1998 was an HP. I've some ancient HP gear, like the 141T spectrum analyser with storage tube and three plugins for 10/100MHz, 1.2GHz and 10/20 GHz. Still a wonderful piece of kit.

[Murphyv310]

Well done Nick.
Nice to receive something you were not expecting especially when it's a quality item which you can use.

[valvekits]

Very nice.

A few years ago I received an unexpected parcel from an old customer of mine.  I didn’t open it for a few days because I thought it was probably just some service manuals that I had left behind.

Turned out it was a goodies parcel full of my favourite Bewleys tea, coffee and Irish food items.

Love those guys!

[ppppenguin]

Nick, what a lovely present. I agree with Mike that the testgear division should have kept the HP name but the bean counters and big bosses though otherwise. Is Keysight a better name than Agilent? Neither means anything compred to HP. Though would you buy anything HP branded these days except for the sauce?

[Nick]

Useful to have more than one meter? Never occurred to me.

I have several excellent DMMs, starting with my venerable but still wonderful Tektronix DMM916 bought from new. Having two very expensive Keysight DMMs is likely an unnecessary extravagance - I have bench top DMMs too, including two 6.5 digit Keithley (Tektronix) 2015 THDs, plus a lot of sacrificial good-enough-but-cheap items. Probably 10-15 in total.

There's a limit.

[ppppenguin]

There's a limit.

Surely not

I've got my old Fluke 87 as my main DMM, even older Fluke 8020 (my first DMM, bought secondhand for £50 c1981) and a few cheapies. A couple of Avo 8s never seem to get used at all.

[peter scott]

When I joined the instrumentation part HP in 1972 the calculator / computer side of the company was principally for controlling / automating the instruments but the instrument side had nothing like the growth rate of the computer side. I suppose it was sensible to let the biggest part of the company run off with the prestigious name when they decided separate the different parts.

After Bill and Dave died off some not very nice things happened to the company.

Peter

[Nick]

Never met Bill or Dave, but I did meet Ken Olson under odd circumstances...

[Nick]

Just had official confirmation from Agilent/Keysight that I can keep the meter