Turn your Rigol DS1052E Oscilloscope into a 100MHz DS1102E

**You're a bad man, Dave. A very bad man.

Nice one. Thanks.

--
Trevor Wilson
www.rageaudio.com.au

What you have done is possibly a criminal act in the USA, using a computer to deprive Rigol of revenue. In the US, "using a computer" to perform an act can be a much more severe crime than the act itself.

I have some sympathy for Rigol here. Many of our products have an option that can be enabled in firmware, and that we charge for. We put a lot of engineering effort into the firmware, and need to be paid for it. If buyers of my gear can order the cheaper one and make it into the expensive one, by copying an EPROM maybe, or setting a bit in flash somewhere, I can't recover the cost of the feature. The act is arguably legal theft. It's certainly moral theft.

Products are increasingly IP and less hardware these days, and the IP is expensive.

Of course, Rigol made it too easy. They will probably go back and make it harder to do, and that will make the scope cost more in both versions.

I recently got a 1052E, and it's a pretty nice scope. The digital filtering is not perfect, but it's sure cute. It has way more goodies than a comparable Tek for under half the price. I'll probably get a few more.

John

This url does not open on my seamonkey but does on IE6 (with a warning to update browser)(which I did not do)

The design cost is amortized over all the units. [Hey, don't worry what the consults charges, it will go to zero as we sell a million units.]

Rigol does themselves a disservice by having to maintain two products. They should just sell the higher speed scope, bomb the market, and then own it.

It's also very dishonest and goes to show why humanity will never make it very far. People like Larkin are too arrogant to understand this. Do you think people would buy their products if they knew that the only difference between the low end and high end versions is the price? At the very least they could have added some true functional improvement that made it justifiable but simply changing the model number doesn't justify a 40% price increase.

You can also upgrade high end Agilent scopes buying the "feature" you want, which turns out to be just a string of characters to be typed somewhere. It is funny to know that you already own the required hardware to go several GHz further! Now _that_ would be interesting to post!

Pere

"Land of the Free" criminalises lots of things. The punters must be ripped off by corporate excess at every turn - just look at the DMCA as an example of how your congress critters are in hock to big business.

The Sony BMG CD rootkit fiasco in 2005 was a particularly nasty example of this with the boot on the other foot.

Even as an originator of IP I find it difficult to have much sympathy for Rigol here when they clearly made no effort to cover their tracks in the firmware. It would only have taken an MD5 or CRC of the serial number XORred with a bit pattern known only to them to prevent hackers.

If you can upgrade it by sending it a new model number then why not?

They won't easily stop hardware mods though. Engineers tweaking commercially available products by swapping out weak components to improve or make them more reliable has been going on since the year dot.

Indeed. And that is why you should not make it trivial to hack.

However, it does make the Rigol DS1052E a very attractive proposition for the moment. UK/Oz attitudes to hacking kit are somewhat more relaxed than in the US. Almost all DVD players here are available in MultiRegion hacked form and even NASA brings its DVD kit to London to be doctored. Region locked players do not sell particularly well to UK film buffs.

You may as well patch them for 100MHz bandwidth then. Send Rigol the price difference or whatever you think it is worth if your conscience bothers you.

Regards, Martin Brown

Fill me in one that please. (I do not waste bandwidth on youtube).

In this country, if I outrightly own item A and item B, what I do with them is my business (legal restictions aside).

Where was the dishonest part? Was their an agreement signed prohibiting use of some part on one of the items

Well, the only difference with Casio calculators over the entire range was the number of wires brought out from under the blob, but they still sell like hot cakes.

far. People like

their products if they

price....

...and access to extended functionality that someone's had to be paid to develop?

Yes.

made it justifiable

...and access to further functionality that someone's had to be paid to develop....

By your logic Microsoft should only be charging $0.50 for the costs of the DVD when they sell Windows7.

Nial

In this case Rigol actually went to the trouble to design-in circuitry to enable this 50MHz "cripple" feature. The front end was clearly designed from day one to be at least 100MHz bandwidth, and they then decided to dumb it down to meet a lower end market and price point by adding the cripple feature. So George is essentially right, the only effective difference is the price.

The only extra functionality is being able to go to 2ns timebase instead of

5ns, everything else is identical. A couple of lines of code?

Any extra design effort that has gone into this product all went in to designing the cripple feature to dumb it down!

A completely silly analogy.

Dave.

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Cheers,

Al

hostage until you pay

It's their design, they can market and sell it whatever way they want to optimise their profits.

Dishonesty would be promising 100MHz performance then delivering 50MHz performance with a demand for more money to get to 100MHz.

?

Nial

Not even that, sometimes. My first casio (age ~13) had lots of extra "hidden" functions (statistical). They just did not appear on the screen printing on the keyboard overlay! But you could access them by just pressing the buttons as if they were.

I suppose in the USA now I would be guilty of computer hacking, breaking the DMCA and breaching license conditions, moral and legal theft.

--

John Devereux

enable this 50MHz

least 100MHz

and price point by

OK but they had to design in the functionality to allow them to change the front end bandwidth.

The only way this is dishonest is if they promised something and didn't deliver it.

If you bought a 50MHz scope you got that, if you spent more you got one with 100MHz bandwidth.

Someone posted earlier saying they should have just flooded the market with the 100MHz scope but that's their business decision.

It's not dishonest.

5ns, everything else

designing the cripple

Or add the flexibility to set the bandwidth.

Not really, the argument was that the price should be set on the hardware and that firmware that enables functionality is dishonest to charge for.

Nial

"Naive Stewart"

" Hmmm, Rigol is the dishonest party here. "

** Shame that if they told buyers the truth they would not get away with it.

Obtaining financial benefit by deception is the very definition of criminal fraud.

** Nope - that would be blatant example of extortion.

You ignorant d*****ad.

.... Phil

Hmmm, Rigol is the dishonest party here.

They sell you a device that's made with 100Mhz circuitry and then hold it hostage until you pay more.

hamilton

"Phul (of it) Allinson"

fraud.

Fair enough, I agree completely with this statement.

If you pay for a scope they say has 50MHz bandwidth, they deliver a scope that has a 50MHz bandwidth?

If you pay for a scope they say has 100MHz bandwidth, they deliver a scope that has a 100MHz bandwidth?

Where is the deception?

performance

And dishonesty.

Perhaps a better example would be promising a scope with 100MHz bandwidth then delivering 50MHz bandwidth.

People got exactly what they were prepared to pay for, and AFAIK were getting good value for money.

I don't know much about classical music, or opera (apart from Gilbert and Sullivan), or classical languages, or modern languages, or have read much 'great' literature so in many ways I am ignorant.

I'll leave the d*****ad judgement to my friends.

Nial

I'm afraid I'm not lowering myself to your level Phil.

Where does all that frustration come from?

I don't know where you get that from.

Nial.

David L. Jones Inscribed thus:

Priceless. ;-)

--
Best Regards:
                Baron.