In 1999 when I started at the national lab, and until just a few years ago, most of our labs had 500MHz or so TDS7xx series scopes.
Once the Tek TDS3000 series came out, the knob responsiveness was so much better that I would pull my hair out any time I tried to use a lab scope. So I'd quickly run to get my portable TDS3000 and fix the scientists' problems using that.
Eventually most of the labs upgraded to TDS3000 series, then over the past few years I've only bought Agilent (plus one LeCroy).
When you are running a business though, buying a lot of performance on a low budget is wise. I just hope you don't kill too much time waiting for the old scopes to do something after incrementing a knob.
Oh, I did mistakenly buy a Tek MSO4054 a few years back. I hate the thing. It seems to take 10 seconds to do *anything* when the deep memory is selected. One gets conditioned to just not wait for a scope after using Agilent for a while.
I'm going to start polling around work to see if someone will buy me another little Agilent 3000X or maybe even a Yokogawa that costs 1/3 to
1/2 the price of the Tek, and they can have the Tek.Or maybe our new Laser Technologist can use it.
That reminds me, I have to inquire next week as to why I discovered this morning that he (and a new post-doc) were using a 70MHz scope to look at
8ns laser pulses?!?!When he started I had him derive the relationship between BW and rise time. Yet he seems to have missed the point. He's a great mathematician with a B.S. in physics, and no practical wits whatsoever. Hopefully he'll learn...
It's hard to relate to people who didn't learn their practical skills from doing this stuff (sans theory) from the time of pre-adolescence like I did.