amazing ARB pricing

Or less. Many clone suppliers of this design. The DDS is probably a AD9851. Frequency counter modules are available for < $15 (cloned hobbyist design, perhaps incorporated here?) 2.4" TFT color LCD screens retail under $5 in singles, and there's plenty of driver code for Arduino and STM32. Don't know what DAC the ARB generator uses, but there's not much magic there.

The magic is to be able to make a profit, at these prices.

I have no idea about this, but we've bought some semi broken stuff on amazon. So check it out when it comes in.

George H.

Interesting, but when I looked it sez: "currently unavailable".

There are a zillion rebrands of that same box.

It's amazing that someone cound set up a serious electronics lab now (scope, generators, DVM, power supplies, soldering stuff, Spice and PCB software) for way under $1000, and get parts and proto PC boards dirt cheap. A web site for advertising could be free. All you'd need then is ideas and energy.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

For us who were late to the game what was the "amazing" price? currently the pricing can only be described as disappointing.

--
  When I tried casting out nines I made a hash of it.

It's part of why I'm driving a 40k car and have my own little home to live in at this point in my life instead of waiting tables with an art school degree. I still make art but a boy's gotta eat

$99 would be a very good price, from what I can see, better than China list- looks like a more normal price would be about $150-$200 in the US for the 60MHz version. The lower frequency versions are significantly cheaper.

It appears to use an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA driving 14-bit DAC. 320x240 color TFT. This is NOT your hobbyist DDS chip.

Certainly not as nice as a Keysight (or whatever they're calling themselves these days) or a Rigol, but very economical.

--sp

st- looks like a more normal price would be about $150-$200 in the US for t he 60MHz version. The lower frequency versions are significantly cheaper.

olor TFT. This is NOT your hobbyist DDS chip.

es these days) or a Rigol, but very economical.

P.S. the manufacturer appears to victim of being badmouthed by some of thei r competitors using fake names.

So they say "?True gold fears no fire" (a person of integrity can w ithstand a severe test)

Looks like there might be competitive units (possibly copies) which use res istor networks direct from the FPGA outputs rather than the DAC. They also claim 60s short-circuit capability on the outputs (my Agilent Arb has a bu nch of relatively expensive op-amps in parallel to get the output drive). I would say some caution is called for if one wants to buy one of these appa rently identical units.

--sp

The prevalence of cloning in this kind of device is usually because someone published the designs.

It's often an advanced hobbyist. I have a couple of gadgets like this; if you search hard enough you can find the original blog postings showing where the design was developed. There are plenty of hobbyists advanced enough to have developed this design.

I haven't searched, but mere hardware copying wouldn't result in the plethora of clones; the original software has to be published somewhere. Otherwise the cloners would have to write it again (differently) to accommodate any design changes, and that's too much like hard work; they'd need to understand how what they were cloning works.

Googled it and there's a huge thread at EEVBLOG on this product.

-sp

I have a classic B+K analog (well, with frequency counter) fungen on my bench. The human interface is highly advanced: you turn knobs to do stuff. I wish my car did that.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Good info, thanks. My comments about cloners stand, I think.

I didn't read the whole thread, just the first and last few plus a page here and there, but by the end the take home message seemed to be to get the model 6800 since it fixes most or all of the complaints, especially about grounding. It's on eBay for $110-120 depending on frequency range (20, 30,

40, 60 MHz) so basically the same price. Interestingly, each frequency step only adds about $2-3 to the price so I don't see why anyone wouldn't just get the 60 MHz model.

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Regards, 
Carl Ijames

I didn?t read the entire thread, but there was a discussion about j itter and high frequency shape distortion

But good link, Larkin, I have a HP33120A arb generator

It?s really good. I bought it 20 years ago, and I measured most imp ortant specs a couple of months ago, and almost no drift

Amazingly bad design about square wave function, not possible to generate d uty cycle above 80 or below 20 percent. Need to fiddle with burst mode

Also, no signal off button

So will buy the Chinese model for sure, even though I do not need it badly or even remotely (wife buys shoes, I buy tools and electronics)

Cheers

Klaus

A 200MHz scope for 379 USD:

Cheers

Klaus

China domestic retail pricing is almost exactly double for the 60MHz compared to 20MHz. That's for the original unit from the factory. Some (maybe most) of the eBay ones appear to be clones. I wonder if they cheaped out on the DAC.

--sp

you don't think they cheaped out on every bit?

NT

This one is $61, shipped.

The specs are interesting.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

I'm totally in love with this keysight 'scope, but I think it's close to ~$1k.. it just does everything right. (and it all starts with the triggering.)

I turn it on and it remembers all the last settings, all stuff should do that.

George H.