Very often people doing R&D ask me if they need to have their oscilloscope calibrated. And for most of the time, my answer is no unless they need to have the NIST traceability or the calibration sticker to keep the regulatory bodies happy. They often thought it’s adjusting the calibration coefficients (or knobs) to make the unit more accurate. This is COMPLETELY WRONG.

In EEVBlog, they showed a video interview with Agilent Metrologist explaining what calibration actually does: it gives you the sample data points against trusted references about how your test instruments’ references has drifted between calibrations. Actually it’s preferable to not adjust the instruments if it’s already within specs.