[time-nuts] Chinese Scopes

[Roberto Barrios]

Please, please, do not tell stories like that regarding the radar to be used 
to land on Mars. It makes me feel so sad, and my life so uninteresting...

That was a joke, I want more of thaaaaat !!

By the way, I was trying to keeping it secret but as Robert just explained, 
the Agilent 546XX are soooo nice to use. You won't see that on the specs 
(the waveforms/sec display maybe) but it is a joy to use. I discarded other 
TEK, RIGOL and LECROY and I am only keeping this one. It simply does not get 
in the way of your work in any way. I hope prices do not skyrocket because 
of this two posts...

Regards,
Roberto EB4EQA

-----Original Message----- 
From: Jim Lux
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 4:27 PM
To: time-nuts at febo.com
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Chinese Scopes

On 4/17/12 6:56 AM, shalimr9 at gmail.com wrote:
> I agree that memory depth is an under appreciated parameter, but even 
> 2,500 points like what's available on the cheap Tek scopes is quite 
> useful.
>
> On the other hand, I had a few LeCroy with 50k deep memories and there are 
> cases where that is very useful too. I can't imagine real life use cases 
> when I would need multiple MB. It would be nice to have but seldom used.
>

oddly enough, I had a case where very deep memory was useful last fall.
  It was an issue with logic that was switching from one clock source to
another where the clocks were orders of magnitude different frequency
(10Hz and 300kHz or something like that), and it was the relative timing
of the edges that was important, so you needed a bunch of cycles of the
low frequency clock (i.e. record length of half a second or so), but
enough samples to see the timing of the 300kHz at the same time.

Another deep memory use was when I used a fast 20GHz sample rate Tek
scope a few years back (2007) debugging a radar target simulator (for
the landing radar that's going to be used to land on Mars in August) and
deep buffers were nice there, because we essentially needed to capture
multiple pulses that were 4 ns to several microseconds long.   The
requirement was that the delta phase (and time) of successive pulses be
within a certain value (the radar used what's known as "two pulse
doppler") following a pre-programmed simulated descent profile.  We also
wanted the pulse timing after the trigger to be accurate to, as I
recall, 0.5 or 1 ns.

The PRF is pretty high, so you don't have time to unload the memory in
between pulses.

So we did something like 500 pulses, captured 16,384 samples at a time
at 20GS/sec to make a dataset of 16 million samples.

You learn a lot about what's hidden in the specs on inexpensive signal
generators like the Agilent E4421B when you start comparing phase for
1600 pulses 1 microsecond apart.

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