artifact calibration

[radhiabouras]

hello
is there any difference between artifact calibration and normal calbration for fluke 5720a/03

[scottbp]

Artifact calibration is when the 5720A automatically calibrates itself. You show it what 10 volts, 10 kohms, and 1 ohm looks like, and it adjusts itself to those three standards, scaling up and down in voltage and resistance, mathematically deriving the other parameters off of just those three standards. An analogy would be an orchestra- Everybody tunes to just a few tuning forks, scaling up and down the octaves across the capabilities of their instruments until everybody is in tune with each other. You don't try to match every single note to a tuning fork- that would take forever and require a hundred or so tuning forks.

"Regular calibration", or full verification, as Fluke calls it, is when you tell the calibrator to source its parameters and you measure them externally to see how well it did its automatic calibration. That would be analogous to each person in the orchestra playing a range of notes to a well trained ear to see how well they tuned their instrument to the rest of the orchestra.

Fluke recommends artifact calibration yearly, and full verification once every two years (after the artifact calibration).

[MRD]

ACV Accuracy vs ACV Stability.  You can verify ACV Stability but cannot verify ACV Accuracy.Wideband Calibration alone is another animal.

I do concurr with scottbp, we send our high end calibrators out for calibration by Fluke every other year and perform an artifact cal every year.