New, pretty Tek arbitrary/function generators - AFG3000

My co-author, Paul Horowitz, purchase the middle unit last week, and likes it a lot. One of his graduate students, Andrew Howard, is using it for performance tests on an IC that has 32 A/D converters, each running at 1GHz. Details at

Andrew told me he likes the Tek's scope-like display that lets him immediately see which waveform he's selected, and what he's doing as he twiddles with editing the waveforms.

Starting at $1780! Up to $8500

Hi,

What do people think about these:

I am very tempted to get one of the mid range types...

Thanks! Great stuff to know about!

Jon

That one hits a sweet spot, 25MHz is too low, 1 channel is too few, and $9k is a bit too expensive.

AFG3021 Arbitrary/Function Generator, 25 MHz, 1 channel $1,880 AFG3022 Arbitrary/Function Generator, 25 MHz, 2 channels $2,850 AFG3101 Arbitrary/Function Generator, 100 MHz, 1 channel $3,800 AFG3102 Arbitrary/Function Generator, 100 MHz, 2 channels $5,000 AFG3251 Arbitrary/Function Generator, 240 MHz, 1 channel $6,758 AFG3252 Arbitrary/Function Generator, 240 MHz, 2 channels $9,000

(US dollar prices above are approximate; I converted from UK currency!)

That looks like cool stuff. I enjoyed looking through all the photos of the observatory construction and electronics.

Thanks,

And they may discover other, natural time-domain phenomena, pulsar-type stuff.

John

Yes, that's exactly the one I was looking at.

The way I see it, there are only two or three possibilities for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the most likely being, if they're so f---ing intelligent, they're probably avoiding Terra like the plague ;-). Or, when they land, they land in the backwoods where they won't disturb the locals, just like the Star Trek crew always do (the 'Prime Directive') (this is why the sightings are always by the backwoods folks), Or, they got almost as smart as us, and had a nuclear war and wiped themselves out. Or, they're astral entities (the flying saucers are actually angels, and only a few people are privileged to see them.[1])

Should we vote on the status of the extraterrestrials? - Oh, yeah, I forgot: (D) none of the above, there ain't no such thing.

- heh. :-)

Thanks! Rich

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A lot of terrestrial intelligence going to waste in search for the non-terrestrial variety...

robert

Yes, and in the grand scheme of things this is a small and affordable diversion of scarce resources. Not only that, I'm sure that the experiences gained here will provide even better engineers for other more 'down to earth' projects, elsewhere, which will benefit even more from the fact of it. Probably at a net gain, all things considered.

I noticed that, as well.

Jon

I disagree. I do think the chances of success are very low (because the number of technological extra-terrestrial civilisations in our galaxy is probably zero). But, I might be wrong, and the potential payoff is so large that it justifies continuing research in this area.

Besides, it looks like the group is privately funded, so I guess they can do what they want!

How do you conclude that? Zero is not a solution of any of the predictive equations.

Doomed to failure. They haven't taken into account that comm lasers are limited to 100 kW by the Interstellar Council on Non-proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

But is the funding from humans? Any Eichs about?