Rigol entry-level scopes - Usage opinion?

I have a big sheet of cardboard with one small hole in the middle. I hold it in front of my scope and shoot a pic through the hole with my cell phone. That kills reflections from the lights down the hallway.

I put a post-it on the edge of the screen with notes, so I don't archive a zillion files like TEK00461.jpg or something that I have to keep track of.

It cost $50K.

On 2021-03-19 15:51, Three Jeeps wrote: [Snip!]

Unless you need fancy features daily, so that you get handy in using them all the time, I'd says that all these bells and whistles merely get in the way of using the scope. In my opinion, the most basic functions are sufficient, and there must be an easy way to get the data into a computer. *That's* where the fancy stuff, statistics, Fourier transforms, protocol decoding, etc. can be done.

Jeroen Belleman

I like my cheap Rigol. If I was buying one today I'd look seriously at the low end Keysight scopes. (The keysight web page stinks! I couldn't get prices... but there is a 4-chan. one for ~$1k.)

George H.

I hadn't heard of them. (I'm not in the market for another scope.)

A marketing ploy of: "Rigol Oscilloscopes offer precision measurement, analysis tools, and a user interface unlike any other"

doesn't really appeal...

Though these days with the processing power of a typical sampling scope CPU it hardly breaks a sweat doing a realtime FFT. Being able to grab the data buffer onto a PC for further processing is extremely useful.

They may as well get used to digital scopes from the start. Tube scopes are getting very rare.

The $300-ish Rigols are fine. Even the low-end ones have signal averaging, FFTs, cursors, measurements, variable persistance, and color screens!

Have you tried one of the low end keysights? Signal averaging and such it has way more memory depth than the Rigol. "Beu'a full triggerin' ", English monty python accent. It don't know about the interface to python or whatever.

George H.

No. We are all Rigol now, partly because we have a lot of code to talk to them. We do have a bunch of old Tek 11801s, which are mostly not interfaced.

Probably all the low-end scopes (ie, below $20K or so) are Chinese now. The HP low-end scopes used to actually be Rigols, just twice the price.

Some years ago, when I finally paid some attention to the funny connectors on the Tektronics 7T11 and 7S11 plug-ins, I realized I could read traces from my 50-year-old Tek sampling scope into a computer. That was much better than taking polaroid pictures of the screen! In a limited sense, I can use it as a 10GHz bandwidth digital scope. Not bad for 50-year old hardware! Not only that, but by averaging many acquisitions, I can now clearly see signals that were previously completely drowned in the sampling noise, all but invisible on the normal scope screen.

I love old Tek hardware. It somehow manages to stay relevant and useful.

Jeroen Belleman

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ===================================

** Absurd crap.

** Only if you must have a new one.

...... Phil

I'd be interested in hearing more details about this. I have a pristine, low mileage 7904 with a nice compliment of plugins. I dont have a 7T11 but, depending on what you describe, may be worth picking one up. Yes, definitely beats the polaroid camera mount. lol Thanks J

Or are stuck in the 1980's and trying to troubleshoot you 3 GHz cpu board design.... I am on faculty advisory board of a couple universities....they want their undergraduates to be useful to industry from the outset. One of the recommendations we made ~15 years ago was to upgrade the scopes in the labs to better help in making their graduates attractive/useful to industry. J

The 7T11 has an external sweep input that can be driven from a DAC. The 7S11 has an analog output that can read out with an ADC. I have an S-6 sampler plugged into the 7S11, which has a 30ps risetime. A bit of software handles the DAC and ADC. That's all there is to it.

Here are some pictures where I use this setup to compare the time domain step response of a beam current transformer with the inverse Fourier transform of the frequency response measured with an HP8753D.

Jeroen Belleman

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** Hmmmmm - that supposed to be some kind of wise remark - is it ? ** Really - so *you* are a paid, professional wanker. ** Interesting - that was never the goal of university education in the past. I thought "technical collages " were invented for that. ** So was the idea that university students must never be exposed to an analog scope ( or meter ?) in case it might damage their fragile brains ? What if they had been exposed prior to arriving at university ? Ruined for life ?

...... Phil

We have a ton of 11801s still in use. My bench has a 500 MHz Rigol and an 11802. Those 1180x scopes go to 50 GHz bandwidth.

I have a 7S11 and a 7T11 if you want them.

Not at all. Do you still use analog scopes? Have you used a modern color digital scope?

I'd never go back to analog. All the traces are green!

And analog storage never worked very well.

The old ones are all dying.

=============================

** It's absurd CRAP !!!!!!!

( snip JL drivel)

** Funny how I have 5 of them all working just fine.

One is 50 years old, another over 40.

Older than you.

..... Phil

Not a wise remark - just intended to show that time and methods/tools change/evolve/adapt in accordance with technology movements.

IDK how your inference engine works but in this case, it definitely faulted...

Depends on the goals of school and various departments within the school. In places I am associated with and have visited on accreditation visits, it is something that was often a topic of discussion. Lab facilities were looked at as part of the process. The places I am referring to are ranked in the first 80 schools in the country. It also depends if the undergrad curriculum is only set up to churn out students for grad school or has the perspective that a certain percentage of graduates go out and work in industry.

If your glass is half empty, you may take that perspective but I never said or implied that. Would you have students make a capacitor by cutting and stacking sheets of aluminum foil and wax paper or use the ones currently supplied by the mfg? or have them build a capacitor just to reinforce the capacitance is a function of the area and dielectric property of material?

I doubt it...if they are in an engineering school, they will have mastered counting, multiplication and division, scale factor and could easily be taught how to apply that to counting ticks on a scale and coming up with a meaningful number if they ever had to. By analogy, is one ruined for life if they don't know how to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission? J