Dear Group,
I can finally afford a new oscilloscope to supplement my trusty TEK 465M. My budget is around $3k. I like the newer Agilent scopes, which I have used when someone else was paying. I do mostly low frequency high-precision instruments (analog signals less than about 1 MHz).
The pretty lower-end Agilent scopes are in reach, but I'm tempted to use one of these:
which is driven internally with an FPGA and one of these ADCs:
I make out the ENOB to be 11.6 bits at 125 MSPS with 14 bit samples using 4 channels, and 13.2 bits with 16 bit samples at 62.5 MSPS using one channel. It will also go out to 1 GSPS with 8 bit samples. Analog BW is 200 MHz.
I like the serial decoding for free and the ability to stream data to an external application for creating custom processing. I'm thinking this would be good for prototyping AFEs with signal processing via the PC.
So my thinking is that using this rather obscure configurable ADC that these guys improve performance over the big manufacturers ASICs for my particular applications niche.
What do you think?
ChesterW