RLC bridge

I agree, although what you get from Tek/Agilent/LeCroy is still a markedly different product than what, e.g., the SDR there gives you:

-- First and foremost, you wouldn't find anything from Tek, etc. without a proper data sheet containing things like noise figure measurements, intercept points, etc. Agilent seems quite good about that, Tek is usually OK, LeCroy is perhaps sometimes kinda minimal.

-- Calibration/NIST traceability. This is a big deal for many companies, and the products aimed at the amateur radio market typically don't offer it.

-- Ethernet connections. I like USB as well as anyone, but I'd have to admit that if I were building an automated test system (and this is where the big bucks in test are -- not just a few pieces of equipment here and there for design engineers), I'd consider Ethernet rather more reliable than USB and insist on it. Everything from Tek, etc. has this option today, whereas only some of the second-tier units do.

I think the big guys are already adapting to a large degree -- but they're never going to hit the price points you'd personally like, I expect, if only because their cost of business is too high. The big guys might lose a lot of the low-end market, but there's still a lot of technical hurdles at the mid- to high-end that you just don't see "garage shops" being able to pull off -- there's a reason the vast majority of digital scopes designed in China don't go beyond about a GHz, you know: At that point, the off-the-shelf parts you can use start to become slim pickings, and it pretty much requires a fair amount of DSP work to obtain reasonably-flat frequency responses. I.e., it becomes much more complex than just throwing together a 200MHz scope using off-the-shelf ADCs, an FPGA, some memory and an ARM microcontroller.

---Joel

These?

Looks cute. But now that there is a Signalhound that goes to 12.4GHz I guess it's got a rival. Ok, that's around $2k, don't know what the Ladybug costs.

I love dark beer. Especially the stuff that allows almost no daylight through. Stout, Porter, Bock, Winter Ale. Had Kennebunkport Winter Ale yesterday night.

Reminds me of my former boss. We stopped at Denver airport, had a beer. Wanted to pour from the bottles into our glasses ... nada. The top was frozen.

How do you quantitatively go about measuring CMRR though? To optimize CMRR in, e.g., a diff amp I typically find myself a fast edge and then try to null it out as much as possible, but that doesn't let you say your amp has, e.g., 60dB CMRR at 10MHz or whatever which is what people want to see on a data sheet... and an 8-bit scope just doesn't have enough dynamic range to try to take an FFT and try to measure such high CMRRs...?

...whereas measuring even 80dB CMRR is usually easy on a VNA (or spec an

• tracking gen)...

---Joel

Signal averaging on a digital scope should work. Worst case, we could blow the dust off our spectrum analyzer.

Everything you mention is correct except we were talking about something slightly smaller than a HP8566B that you could take in your carry-on baggage.

For a testing lab, the big three can't usually be beat. And this thing 1) works, 2) cost less than $500, and 3) fits in my laptop case.

Regards, tm

I was responding a bit more generically in that the original point of the thread still included less-than-carry-on-baggage-worthy equipment. ...but your points are well taken...

Yeah, The input on the 720 is a bit clunky... (made for production people to plug lots of 'through hole' parts into.) For surface mount I have to add my own wires.

Are the smart tweezers for good to a percent or so?

George H.

t -

The manual is here:

Regards, tm

No Guinness?!! I dream of a beer frig with Guinness tap... 'Mmm Smack'

George H.

Hmm, just takes one smart guy in a garage. Lot's of guys in China, maybe a lack of garages?

George H.

there's a reason the vast

Well, they better get cracking on that. The steamroller cometh, I can hear its rumble. It reminds me a bit of how GM and Ford execs laughed and scoffed when the first VW Beetles and little Hondas showed up. Just a few years later this turned into "Oh s..t!".

For production yes, for engineering where the bulk of the gear tends to go to, not really.

You can get bridges but even better is a netbook. Those are under $500 and you need a computer anyhow to see a screen. Still smaller than a gib analyzer, and a whole lot cheaper. And ... then you've got LAN access.

That should not be. A big company should have a more efficient cost structure, unless they let their bureaucracy bloat too far. But that can be fixed. Think about it: Why were all small TV manufacturers, grocers, auto companies and so on elbowed out of the marketplace by the big ones?

Right. But you can maybe sell one GHz-scope for every 1000 run-of-the-mills scopes.

Yet that's where the market is and where the money is. This is the big mistake many western auto companies made. They could not imagine that a car as mundane as a Toyota Corolla could bring them to their knees. And then it did.

I use glitch mode or average mode to capture those in-between signals. it may roll it with the next reading but at least you have some visual of it.

Jamie

OK, ok, I will have a Chimay once in a while, even though its optical density isn't ideal. Mo drinks Guinness; can't see why.

IMHO the low end market for scopes ends with 2 channels. If you look for a 4 channel scope then it gets quiet real quick.

The Kelvin tweezers SRS sells are for the birds. Impossibly crude for anything of modern dimensions. Even hard to use on small through-hold parts.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I bought an earlier version - on Win Hill's recommendation - and I'm very happy with it

Gotta be the way to go. I've used one in somebody else's lab, and it was great. The SRS720 (or the version Haffmans BV bought from Thurlby- Thandar who seem to sell the same thing as the LCR4000) is useful, but not in the same class.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Their specs are pretty loose--3% or thereabouts--but they seem to be very much better than that in real life. I just measured a 1 nF capacitor as 1.001 nF.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

om

t -

Cool thanks, lot's of times you don't need absolute accuracy, just resolution.

George H.