Hi everyone,
I was wondering if anyone in this forum has attended to the STAR Service Engineer Training that Hamilton provides for their instrument?
My company is considering this course (a.k.a sending me) as we would like to PM and service our own STAR instruments. I did reach out and obtain information of what the course goes over and its schedule. However, I would like to hear from the attendee’s perspective on what it is like and what else to expect.
Hope to hear from you all,
Nat
I took the course a few years ago. It was super interesting to get to check out some of the STAR internals and tinker a bit with the hardware without risking one of our active instruments. We spent some time calibrating the instrument, taking things apart, and putting them back together again. There’s a lot of focus on the service software, which is walks you through a good bit of the basics.
I’d say it was valuable in that it helped understand some quick ways to troubleshoot common hardware issues, and gave me a better understanding of the instrument. I’ve definitely used those skills to help overcome some issues that might have caused some prolonged down-time otherwise.
Overall, I think the value comes from being able to have someone on site who can do service, which greatly shortens incident response times. The more you can DIY, the less time you’ll spend waiting for an FSE to make a site-visit. However, that training made me feel like the cost of paying for the service contract is worth it. PIP checks to calibrate channels, CORE head adjustments, and calibrating iSWAP all get old pretty fast, and the FSEs can do it all a lot faster than I could without some serious practice. If you’re thinking about doing it to save on service contract, I’d say that all comes down to how much of your time your time you’re willing spend.
Lmk if you have any specific questions!
Luke’s response is spot on! I am speaking from experience of taking the course back in 2018.
While the course will enable you to troubleshoot common hardware issues, do not expect to be FSE speed or knowledgeable at the conclusion of the week. Like any other skill, practice and repetition will help you master that craft.
With that being said, it did help me understand the instrument much better and I can handle simple repairs. Anything major (we replaced our CO-RE Head YZ drive last year) we still defer to the FSE to get it done correctly and efficiently.