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Opinions on 1 GHz scopes please

Folks, At my lab I have a chunk of money to get a new scope. I'm looking at

4 channel MSO's with 1 GHz analog bandwidth. Agilent has the MSO7104B, Tek has the MSO4104, and Lecroy has the MSO104XS-A, all for about $18000. Any horror stories about these companies and their recent products along these lines. Who has praise? I had a couple Lecroy 100 MHz scopes in the 80's which were cool when they worked. Very fragile hangar queens. We got an Agilent Infinium in 2002, which ran windows 98 under the hood and spent quite a bit of its own time belly up. Further, Agilent quit supporting it while the $20000 price was still stinging a little. Tek scopes, well, for me they suddenly develop big offsets, the triggers quit working, and Tek really soaks you for probes and other accessories. I don't have a typical use case to give you. Every month its something different. Looking at noise and laser pulses from APD's, trying to catch glitches in huge switching power supplies, debugging microcontroller circuits, etc.

Thanks in advance for your help

Paul Probert University of Wisconsin

Reply to
Paul Probert
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A used Tek TDS684 is a nice device. Out of support, but you can easily buy three for what a new one would cost. Also--key point--they don't run Windows.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
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hobbs at electrooptical dot net
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Yes, avoid any of the scopes that are running windows. They are just harder to use.

If you want to get data out to a PC, get one that takes a USB memory stick. The networked or computer controlled ones sound nice but it means you need to bring noisy stuff too close to the measurement you are making. Anything that needs special software on your Windoz PC won't work at some point in the not very distant future.

Reply to
MooseFET

One of the things to look for is the ability to have the cursors outside the screen. Another thing to watch for is peak detection / envelope display so even at low sweep rates you won't miss a glitch.

Having Windows on a scope makes it easy to exchange data but also imposes a security risk. Better not connect it to a company wide network.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

I've never bought a new Tek scope with my own money (no special reason - just havn't fancied what they had on offer when I was buying) but I have bought Agilent and recently a LeCroy - not quite as fancy as you can afford. If I were in your shoes I would go for an Agilent - mainly because I've found it easier to get what I needed on the screen with Agilent rather than LeCroy. None of my scopes has died in service yet so I have no useful comment on relative reliability.

Michael Kellett

Reply to
Michael Kellett

Hi Paul,

I am looking for the same thing.

You might want to add Yokogawa DL9000 / DL6000 to your list. I have just noticed these recently and have one right now on eval. They have some nice features for *analog* electronics which seem missing from the Tek offerings. And some annoyances too of course.

In particular I like the switchable input bandwidths - down to 8kHz - in combination with the "high resolution" mode. This can give very high apparent vertical resolution for lower frequency signals (an area neglected by Tek IMO). Yes I know this can obscure what's going on, but once you have established the general picture is it is very nice to see such clean detailed traces. You can make accurate measurements of signals buried deeply in noise.

Another area they are very strong on is parameter measurement. You can draw trend lines and histograms of any measured parameter. So you could have a plot showing how e.g. pulse width varies with time, as you change some other parameter. Or a histogram of pulse heights. Can't see how to plot one parameter against another though, pity.

--

John Devereux
Reply to
John Devereux

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