O'scopes - Tek vs HP/Agilent vs LeCroy

LeCroy's user interface is abhorrent (at least in the Waverunners I've got around here, most of which are quite high-end). I use, love and recomment Agilent.

What Agilent scope series would you recommend?

-Dave Pollum

Stay away from Tek. Their stuff breaks, and when it does, they like to charge you governmental amounts to fix it -- and you can't fix it yourself; all the parts are non-standard. It's not like it used to be. There's a Tek digital in my office with a bad screen. They wanted US$2k to fix, no labor. A friend had the hard drive on a Tek logic analyser go bad; they wanted US$1k. For a hard drive. Not including labor.

I like Agilent's stuff very much, personally, and I haven't heard any bad reports lately, but it's a matter of taste, I suppose. I haven't seen triggering problems on their latest models.

Where I work, there are a number of people who swear by LeCroy. Also probably a point of taste.

Try to get a piece > I'm considering buying a 500/600 Mhz digital 'scope for digital logic

snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net schrieb:

/We/ are very satisfied with the MSO6000 series by Agilent. Modern, very comfortable devices with deep memory at reasonable price.

Tilmann

I really like the MSO8104A, but don't always get to use one. The standard lab scope we have kicking about all over the company is the

For 99% of the work I do (I work on the digital side of wireless sensors, transceivers, receivers, transmitters), the 54656B is fine. 16 digital/2 analog channels, and MegaZoom. The latter feature is just the most useful scope feature to arrive since the discovery of artificial means of generating fire, as far as I'm concerned.

If you have the budget then the Agilent 6000 series is well worth a look. Whn I was buying a 300MHz scope a year or so ago, the Agilent stood way ahead of anything else in the price range - I know Tek have introduced a range since then though so probably worth taking a serious louk at both.

For mixed analogue/digital use, the Agilent MSOs don't really have any competition - since having an MSO (the original 54645D then the MSO6034A) I've only used my logic analyser once in 12 years. Agilent will do evaluation loans for a couple of weeks so you can really give it a good try. Warning - you probably won't want to give it back afterwards...! The speed & responsiveness of the user-interface is way better than any Tek I've ever used.

I have used Yokogawa scopes and rate them as the most reliable. TEK are good. Had a TDS220 with a broken socket once repaired outside of warrantee free of charge. Had a LeCroy once, spent all its time in repair and when I left that company it was still in the repair shop. I don't think they ever got it back. Not bad for the most expensive scope I have ever seen.

I have a keyboard connected to my 16500C, and that is much easier to use than the touch screen. I haven't tried the mouse, yet. BTW, is there a better method for slogging through memory instead of using the

-Dave Pollum

Please control your line length. They should never exceed 79 chars, but 65 to 68 is much better because it survives several levels of quoting. I had to reformat this in its entirety.

I am struck by how far HP (now Agilent) has come with respect to Tek in the past 10 (maybe 20) years or so. They used to be a much inferior choice. At the same time HP has lost all its reputation in the instrumentation field by the silly spin off. Was this one of Carlis ideas? At any rate, HP no longer means highly priced quality.

The main problem with using a keyboard for me is that there is rarely enough flat surface in my work area to use one (grin). Using the keyboard to make large moves in memory by typing in delay values helps some, but its still painful. The other thing that helps is to limit the number of points captured and try to use better trigger qual to get closer to the event you want. Other than these two, I have not found a better way.

Good Luck, Bob

The main problem with using a keyboard for me is that there is rarely enough flat surface in my work area to use one (grin). Using the keyboard to make large moves in memory by typing in delay values helps

some, but its still painful. The other thing that helps is to limit the number of points captured and try to use better trigger qual to get closer to the event you want. Other than these two, I have not found a

better way.

Good Luck, Bob

Bob, I know what you mean about not having enough flat surface! I usually put the keyboard on my lap.

-Dave Pollum

We bought a few LeCroy scopes this past spring (a couple of WaveRunners and a WavePro), chosen because of the lower price. I hate them. The user interface is terrible. They run the desktop version of Windows XP (which crashes!). LeCroy recommends you run a virus scanner on them and run windows updates -- which may or may not be incompatible with LeCroy's software (we keep them off the network, but this makes it a pain to transfer data off them for analysis). They are extremely slow to rescale or change range.

The cheaper WaveRunners, however, are better then the more expensive WavePro (although the protective layers on the screen of one of the cheaper scopes looks like it may be delaminating). The expensive WavePro was crashing constantly. Sometimes it would seem the device under test wasn't producing any signal, but it was just that the scope had crashed and wasn't updating the display! ("fixed" by a scope reboot). When the touch screen stopped working, we returned it for repair. The sales rep arranged for a loaner, faster then our 1GHz scope. It crashed, too. When ours came back from LeCroy, the only "repair" they did was to reinstall Windows! The touch screen worked for another couple of months then went out again. Now the front panel is dead. The only way to change the settings on the scope is with a mouse, going through many menus to do something as basic adjusting the timebase. It's going back for repair soon.

I can't believe anyone would sell a scope that crashes. Why would you build a dedicated scope on a desktop operating system? Do you really need to browse the web or send email from your scope? Do you want to worry about your scope getting infected by the latest Windows exploit? That's just wrong. As someone said elsethread, "LeCroy is evil".

Same reason there's plenty of software out there that crashes? -- Most companies, these days, feel it's better to get the product out the door with "some amount" of testing and figure they'll issue software updates later as more bugs are found than to extensively test the software.

The problem is that "some amount of testing" can vary *greatly* between different companies.

Because it's a lot cheaper than rolling your own OS these days or using an embedded OS like VxWork or QNX? And programmers witih experience in desktop OSes are a lot easier to find? A better question would be... why didn't they use Linux, like the low-end models of their competitors do?

It can be handy to e-mail yourself data files? It is nice to be able to print to any printer that's already on your network. (But in both cases Linux does pretty well here too...)

Don't plug the machine into your network if you're worried about such things?

John just thinks Walter LeCroy is a prick. :-) I haven't heard why, although I imagine he's expounded on it at some point.

That's good to hear. I crossed HP off my list about 10 years ago when I watched a buddy of mine fighting with an HP scope that ran Windows9x. It UI was a horror to use, but that was ameliorated somewhat by the fact that you spent very little time actually using it before it crashed and had to reboot.

It would be OK as long as the HD was only for auxiliary storage and would keep running w/o it.

........

If you must have a disk drive for your scope you might as well use a USB scope like Picoscope, the new 500 series has some serious triggering mechanisms. I know the hardware is likely to work as I know the analog/RF designer who designed the front end for them.

-- Paul Carpenter | snipped-for-privacy@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk PC Services GNU H8 & mailing list info For those web sites you hate

Joel said: "...just defending the concept of "desktop OS"-based instruments in general; it's clearly the direction things like scopes, spectrum/network analyzers, DLAs, etc. are going."

I used a late model Tek LA a few months ago for about a week. It ran Windows (2K or XP???). I powered it up in the morning and powered it off before I left for the day. It didn't take me long to figure out how to use the LA, and it became a joy to use compared to my HP 16500C LA.

Another point - if the entire instrument crashes, well that's really annoying, but the instrument should _not lie_ about the signals it's probing just because the O/S goes belly up! A non-trustworthy peice of test gear is useless - it's a huge waste of time.

-Dave Pollum

That doesn't mean it's the right direction.

So the 16500C's UI isn't as good, and the one on Windows is better. That doesn't mean that it's the best idea to run a logic analyser on Windows.

Most of the UI doesn't come so much from the OS anyway. You probably (hopefully) spend most of your time working within the analyser application. On some recent Tek models, that's actually LabVIEW. (Can they get any lazier?)

And one that crashes frequently, and requires security patches (the idea!), and spends gobs of time booting up, and uses special PC components that go obsolete in six months, and special hard drives that come in special cases so you can't repair them yourself, and so the maker can charge you ungodly parts & labour cost, is also a giant waste of time.

I hated Windows scopes when they first came out, and I still hate them now (in case you couldn't tell). Not only do they have the same Fisher-Price feel to them that regular Windows has, they have the same reliability. A workman is known by his tools.

Besides, I've already got a Windows laptop, which I have to use for work. If I have to use Windows on an instrument, I'd rather just use my laptop, which has a bigger screen, an attached keyboard, and a known set of foibles. So give me the PicoScope-type instruments any day, if Windows has to be in the mix.

--mpa

That actually makes sense for data-intensive things like logic analyzers and maybe spectrum analyzers. Scopes should have knobs and screens.

John