The Benefits of Using Transfer Standards

In order to perform calibrations with a high degree of accuracy, reference standards must be employed at every range or decade of the measuring or calibration instrumentation. Clearly, this can be difficult and costly since these standards must be highly stable and their precise values must be known with a high degree of certainty and sufficient resolution.

To minimize the cost and difficulty, more practical means of performing such calibrations is to use transfer standards.

If one has a single standard that is calibrated by a national laboratory, one can then compare the transfer standards to the certified standard by ratio techniques. See our Technical Applications section for a full tutorial.