no more HP, no more Agilent scopes

Rigol etal have been eating their lunch. Maybe the Fluke, Tek .. group will buy the test and measurement part of Aglient.

George H.

Guess they couldn't stand up to the Asian competition at the low end. That was clearly preventable.

The weird thing is that I was never all that much impressed with their medical side. They competed against us (Endosonics, now Volcano) in the market of intravascular ultrasound or IVUS, with us being a small company of around 300 employees. One morning I came into the office and the building was abuzz. HP had thrown in the towel. I couldn't believe it.

As if on cue my trusty old HP4191A impedance analyzer just commemorated this HP/Agilent burial for instruments by a spectacular pop .. crackle .. *PHUT* suicide event in the middle of a measurement. At first it sounded like firecrackers going off at the lab bench and then an impressive plume of smoke wafted out of the analyzer. The stench is still horrid in here despite the immediately opened windows. Smells like the transformer is gone :-(

Perhaps, but I still like their scopes better than the competition but then again, they're not coming out of my piggy bank.

And here I just today got an HP 8566B in what looks like excellent shape, with a nice bright display, for $950.

How are the mighty fallen.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Rigol spectrum analyzers are getting cheap. That has to be pushing Agilent upscale, into the high-price, low-volume part of the market.

It could also be the CM RFI line filter capacitor(s).

Is that one of those pieces of test equipment that lasted for 40 years?

Maybe "EM" stands for Extremely Mobile, as in "poof" no more...

Mine has lasted around 30 years now. Well, until yesterday. Haven't opened it yet but according to the amount of smoke the damage must be substantial. Not sure if it has to be scrapped.

Problem is, such a component and materials analyzer that goes to 1GHz in

If you don't mind the phase noise being 30 dB off the pace, the cheap ones can be useful.

I was looking quite seriously at a Tek MSO scope/logic analyzer/spectrum analyzer combo at one point (for a job that hasn't come in yet), but the close-in phase noise was fairly horrible.

Next week I'm going to be starting some high-speed Doppler interferometry of small particles (0.2 um particles moving at up to 3 km/s, i.e. Mach 9). With a Nd:YAG laser, the Doppler velocity in backscatter ranges up to about 6 GHz, for which I really need some upgrade frequency-domain test gear, hence the 8566B. (Getting it that cheap was just dumb luck.)

I should really have a network analyzer as well, but those aren't nearly as common.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That sort of sounds like a time-domain problem, for a fast scope. Particles will probably chirp.

Is there an algorithm, like some sort of time-skewed FFT, that will pluck a chirp out of the noise? Of course, a chirp has an f-vs-t waveform, linear if you're lucky, but a higher polynomial if you're not. Searching for that would be interesting, maybe enough to be a PhD dissertation. I suspect it's been done.

You could probably fit an f/t polynomial to noise without really trying.

We have that 4-channel 7 GHz LeCroy scope, if you'd like to use it some time.

The way I read it, the yet unnamed EM group for medical testers want a divorce from Agilent, the T&M Industrial giant which will remain in tact and same name with their declining revenue from cheap competition.

Fear not, Agilent scopes will survive longer than Blackberry, .... , there are no gaurantees.

The way it's being reported, the shareholders are tired of electronic T&M losing money and dragging down the earnings of the medical/analytical part of the company. The medical part will keep the Agilent name. T&M might wind up being sold cheap, as they seem to not be viable on their own.

Agreed. There may already have been an offer for the test and measurement division. A clue is that no name has been selected. If the division were to be handed over to a buyer intact, no name would be necessary. However, if it were to continue on its own, it would need a new name. Selecting a new company name takes many months of research. The name change can also be expensive, requiring changes in product labeling, signage, stationary, contracts, web sites, etc. The lack of a new name, and the lack of the traditional pre-announcement leaks, sounds like a rush job, which would be typical preparation for a quick sale.

Yes ... I mis read that the spinoff was the small growing Medical group who want the divorce, but it is the shareholders who want to dump the old wing started by Hewlett & Packard with growing losses.

Ty

Thanks. At IBM, I had a Tek TDS7704B that was about that fast. Nice piece of gear. In my current reduced circumstances, I have to make do with a 3-GHz TDS694C, but we must adjust to these trials. ;)

The client will be using a very fancy Agilent (or whatever the HP-of-the-month is called) scope as the back end, at least initially, but I have no way of making Mach 9 particles myself.

What I need it for is to make sure that the differential photodetectors are really differential out to 6 GHz, because laser noise cancellers don't work that far out.

The plan is to get + and - polarity photodetectors (8.5 GHz BW) and connect them in parallel using a hybrid. A network analyzer would be better for this job, but less useful for other things, and considerably more expensive.

The beam is less than 400 um in diameter, so I expect that the chirp due to deceleration will be smaller than the broadening due to the transit time in most cases, but I'll have to go calculate that, or at least estimate it. (The first week's work is a calculation, as usual.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Possibly. Looks all clean in there but who knows? I just opened it up and, holding my breath, turned it on. It runs! Considering that something in there must have spewed its guts out and produced a massive amount of smoke that is amazing.

I guess a more major tear-down is in order now, got to find what blew.

HP sure made some good stuff.

AFAIK Rigol have been maing the low end scopes for Agilent but Rigol is now moving into the high-end arena as well. I wouldn't be surprised when Rigol buys the T&M division from Agilent.