Low end TEK 'scope

Yeah, I've used a low end HP scope at a vendor's place and it has similar resolution. Not really a problem for lots of routine work, but for a lab scope I'd prefer to have something a bit higher res. I can't image 800x600 would be much of the cost of a $1000+ instrument and I'd really like to see more like HD 720 (1280x720).

But then that is another reason why I'd like to have an attached scope front head to use with a PC.

I remember the EEblog guy (or whatever his videos are called, the one with the high pitched voice) talking about attached scopes pointing out that he has no PC in his lab. I think he is looking at it the wrong way. I'd rather have a dozen instruments hooked up to one PC with a nice big display than to have a dozen front panels that take up the entire work bench. For devices that have a lot of controls I've seen people attach knob arrays and end up with something very pleasing to use.

--

Rick

Hmm, no I haven't found any data logging. (My boss is playing with it. :^)

George H.

Oh I hadn't looked at the 1000Z's. About the same price point. (Still the rigol could use another set of vertical control knobs.)

George H.

I currently have a 1024x768 (10" I think) scope from Agilent but it displays the traces fatter so there is not much gained there.

IMHO attaching knob arrays to control a PC scope is putting the horse behind the carriage. Besides that the control boxes will clutter your bench more than a stack of equipment (one of the reasons I got rid of handheld multimeters and got benchtop models instead).

For an oscilloscope I like to have the controls on the machine itself. There is so much to configure and using a mouse to control all that is just to tedious. I have used a Picoscope in the past and it just doesn't cut it. Maybe a touchscreen would help. Then again I prefer to use my logic analyser (which traditionally only has a few controls) from a PC because of the bigger & wider screen.

$500 for a 50MHz 2-channel is quite pricey these days.

I suggested to a client to buy a similar one and when they saw the price they thought it was off by a digit, they had budgeted $3k and couldn't believe it. The next surprise came when the PC-control software for it was free.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

This is the very reason why I did not buy Tektronix but chose Instek five or six years ago. Tek had a paltry 4k memory in there. No way to perform any serious pulse-echo stuff with that. Instek had 25k back then.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

I can run my Instek 200MHz DSO through the PC if I want to. That gives me a nice big display I can see from clear across the room. For longer jobs I usually do it because that makes documentation very easy.

I couldn't find anything decent for a scope. There are the Picoscopes but at least a few years ago they had rather high prices. A benchtop scope was less expensive.

Other than that I am also into PC-driven tools. For example, the spectrum analyzer and RF generator are the size of three cigarette packs each and easily slide under the slightly raised bottom shelf of my lab rack. In the olden days they would have been two chunky boxes.

In this day and age a lab without a PC is outdated. It would be utterly useless to me. You couldn't even operate mundane things such as a Labjack, or download uC code, or look up datasheets, or get a Digikey price, or ...

I just went benchtop on the multimeter as well. Splurged and got a 6-1/2 digit from Fluke. But with the spectrum analyzer I went in the other direction, instead of the big box it's a 100% PC-driven.

PC control becomes nice if you do certain routine measurements. For me that's pulse-echo and such. With PC devices I can have the requisite setup files in each client directory and could easily find them even a few years down the road.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

I know, that is what people are used to and if you have the room, dedicated equipment is ok. But you don't need a separate control box for every instrument any more than you need a separate keyboard for every program you run.

Funny that you don't like the mouse. For a few inputs it is useful to have knobs, but most of the control of scopes these days are done through menus whether on a dedicated scope or a PC.

Notice everyone likes a big screen on a scope.

I did figure out why most scopes are still landscape shaped rather than a bench space saving portrait shape. I expect they still sell a number of them to be mounted in rack cabinets. There a portrait shaped scope would take up a lot more space.

--

Rick

That is what I have found also. Less product (no UI hardware) and higher price. Seems counter intuitive.

I was on the brink of buying a $450 Hantek scope but couldn't find any real reviews of it. So I sprung for the similar $75 one. I would have posted here the results of some testing, but I never got the software to run. The installation was difficult and when I run the program it comes up and then disappears. Hantek themselves are not much for support. So I got a refund.

I suppose the EEblog guy doesn't do much digital stuff.

Which product?

That is very useful. I noticed the scope in this thread will save setups to a USB memory as well as internally. Much easier to just keep them with all the other customer data.

--

Rick

My scope has a 20" display. 15kPts (if I enable it all).

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

20" and only 800x600 resolution, if that? I guess it takes a while to scroll through all 15k points.

--

Rick

It is VGA resolution. It looks like a typical Tek TDS500/600/700 series screen. Probably TDS520 or so.

Rackmount is not big market anymore, those days are gone. People like wide screens because it allows them to easier scroll through and find out where the waveform looks iffy or where some condition in relation to a signal on another trace is being violated. Very handy to find things like the occasional shoot-through in a bridge drive.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Rackmount is not big market anymore, those days are gone. People like wide screens because it allows them to easier scroll through and find out where the waveform looks iffy or where some condition in relation to a signal on another trace is being violated. Very handy to find things like the occasional shoot-through in a bridge drive.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/ 
================================================================== 

Wide screens are fine, great actually, just put the controls below the  
screen instead of beside it so the screen defines the width of the scope.  
That way you minimize the bench area it takes up.  Only problem I can see is  
the potential to tip over sideways if you make it tooooo tall and narrow,  


----- 
Regards, 
Carl Ijames carl.ijames aat deletethis verizon dott net

Scopes are so cheap, we pop one into almost every rackmount production test system that we do. Just to make sure a scope is always handy. We sometimes interface them, too, to do time and RMS volts measurement and such.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

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

460 (not the -A).

They put a VGA connector on the back of the thing, for whatever reason.

9-pin D-sub. Apparently an archaic VGA, before the 15 pin version took over. Amazingly, though it's a monochrome* display, they put in the RGB correctly so that it shows up just as green on a monitor.

As VGA, it's only 640x480.

*Mono as in green. I guess it actually has three levels (black, grid/persistence, and everything else).

And yes, being a TDSxxx, it takes *forever* to scroll through 15kPts. The menus and controls are terrible.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

Do you have one of those ~$400 4-channel Rigols that N. Coesel mentioned. I was thinking I would mind one set of voltage knobs w/ 4 chans.

I was thinking it would be nice if you could have one scope probe split into two time delayed channels. Looking at both the rising and falling edges at the same "time" for instance.

George H.

No, we have a bunch of the 2-channel ones.

We have the big 1 GHz Rigol.

It's pretty nice, but

1. It seems to share ADCs between channels or something. Trace 1 changes when we turn trace 2 on/off

1. It has aliasing problems. It's a 1 GHz scope that samples at 5 GHz. But we were looking at a 600 MHz square wave (which, reasonably, looks like a sine wave) and it looked fuzzy. Zoomed out, the fuzziness is actually AM at some modest fraction of 600M. I thought our oscillator was wonky, but it turned out to be the scope. A trusty old 11801 sampler shows a beautiful, stable square wave.

Sampling at 2.5x Nyquist, it should be better than that.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

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

I'm not talking about the screen shape. I'm talking about the box shape.

--

Rick