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From: John Devereux on 20 Jun 2010 11:54
Paul Probert <paulprobert(a)sbcglobal.net> writes:

> 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

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
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