Recently I had the privilege of being able to attend the Fluke MET-301 Advanced Hands-On Metrology course, which was held at the Fluke Corporation headquarters in Everett, Washington.
The course is promoted as being for people who already have experience in electrical metrology but are wanting to work at secondary and primary levels of metrology. This is exactly where The CPS Electrical cal lab was wanting to head. Having recently invested in the latest Fluke Calibration equipment to enable us to achieve this.
We needed a better understanding of the “ins & outs” of making precision measurements, in particular what can lead to errors and contribute uncertainties to our measurements. With no hands-on training available in this part of the world it was decided to invest the time and cost of attending the 4 day MET-301 course in Everett, Washington.
Everett is at the very Northern end of the Seattle metropolitan area and is also home to the massive Boeing facility (right next door to Fluke). Having never been to the Northwest area of the US, I was excited to be able to visit this area and would definitely recommend a visit at some point. The Fluke facility in Everett was purpose built by Fluke and is where a lot of the Fluke products are developed, assembled and tested. It is also home the the Fluke Primary Standards Lab and the Fluke Service Centre where all the precision meters and calibrators are serviced and calibrated. It’s a fantastic modern facility with great amenities including the best cafeteria I’ve ever seen, and a Fluke “museum” which displays the history of Fluke product development.
The class was a small group of only six students which enabled excellent interaction between students and instructor. We were all given a very comprehensive course textbook and lab handbook, as well as a copy of the ASQ “The Metrology Handbook – Second Edition”.
Our instructor was a contractor who had previously been employed in various roles at Fluke for over 30 years. He had a vast array of experience including leadership roles with NCLS and had been involved in the development of a number of standards including ISO 17025. His depth of knowledge and experience was immediately apparent and quite remarkable.
Each day the course was spilt up into theory work in the morning and practical lab exercises in the afternoon. The course content is focused on DC and Low Frequency metrology and covers topics including Guarding, Cables & Connectors, Statistics in Metrology, Applying Precision Instrument Specifications, Reference Standards, and DC Ratio Measurements. The Lab exercises consisted of 13 different exercises that were worked through in pairs. These exercises demonstrated what had been covered in the theory work. The class room was well equipped with 5500 & 5700 Calibrators, 8508A & HP 3458 long scale DMM’s, 10 V Zener References, Voltage Dividers, Null Detectors, and Standard Resistors.
I found this to be an excellent course. It’s very practical and the content is all based around “real-world” scenarios that calibration labs such as ourselves are faced with everyday. It’s written and presented by people who have decades of experience in calibration work, using equipment that is used in just about every calibration lab you’ll find. You get to spend time talking and discussing problems you have come across and hear solutions that have been found, not only from the instructor, but also from the other students. I would highly recommend this course to anyone looking to increase their knowledge and experience in electrical metrology. You simply can’t get anything like this from reading textbooks alone. It’s worth every penny!!