Log on, check up

Electronics engineers will no longer have to ship test equipment to standards
labs to get it calibrated. Last week Britain’s National Physical Laboratory in
Teddington made its database of radio frequency measurement standards available
online. Users anywhere in the world can log on to NPL’s server—perhaps
using a cellphone modem—and the software will interrogate their
measurement equipment to see if it has strayed from known frequency standards.
British Aerospace expects the system to cut calibration costs tenfold.