After 20+ years servicing and repairing and updating broadcast transmitters to 20KW, associated signal source and processing equipment there is always a good idea to update firmware to the latest (unless there are reports of catastrophes!). So often there is no recognised or achknowledged issue and yet it is in the supplier/manufacturers interest to fix (what they admit to) and (what they don't admit too)
Point in place. My s/h 35000 hours 2000 -1005 HP Agilent 3GHz signal generator had 3.50 software and worked fine. Then after a few months started having some sort of communication between boards problem. Mainly reference module. Ok bite the bullet, updated the firmware 3.86 last produced (nothing related to this problem was acknowledged or reported) and viola, no more problems, all functions now work smoothly. It just does its thing. Seems there were many changes (not admitted to) that had occurred under the hood. Note: this was 19200 baud serial taking over 1hr!
TNO Trust noone security thinking. They are lying sods not telling the truth. However they have a vested interest to solve as much as possible as their reputation and long term viability rides on how good their product is.
Any FW update once installed by a few with no reports of disaster, I then do. Of course taking ALL care and precautions, reading all information, using only the correct files after full research. So far these updates personally and commercially have all been worthwhile.
Also apart from above. Support requests to major manufacturers results in the FIRST question, "what level of firmware are you?" Not the latest, we have available then just go away and dont come back, until the latest is installed and they know that a firmware + factory reset will resolve many problems so they dont have to deal with them.
FW updates, I do the lot.
