Hi welcome to our first impressions Review of the new Siglent SDS 1000 X-series oscilloscope. Quite excited about this one. There's been a lot of anticipation because its feature set and value for money looks pretty darn impressive thanks to Charles Holtam it trio test and measurement. He's the only one in the country who's got it.

He just got it and he just load it to me to check it out for a little bit. So let's take a quick look at it. I Believe there's only like a couple of people in the world who have got one of these puppies so you can order it now, but nobody's actually got stock yet. It's coming very, very soon.

So as you can see, it's a yeah basic one gig sample per second 200 megahertz dual channel DSO equivalent to basically the Rye goal IDs 2000 series, which will do a bit of side-by-side comparison. I've got one of those, so we'll do that shortly. But the exciting thing about this is that it is 200 megahertz for wait for it. 659 US dollars.

That's the street price going for this thing and it's just over a thousand smidgen over a thousand bucks. art not including GST here in Australia So it is ridiculously cheap and it comes in two models. There is a 100 megahertz version of this. Now this 70 megahertz are rubbish or not, even 50 comes in 100 or 200 megahertz.

The 100 megahertz one is only 499 us bucks or under $800 Australian here. Ridiculously cheap for the bandwidth, especially the 200 megahertz one. Wow So just as a price comparison with its direct competitor, the Roy Goldy S2000 series here are both dual channel, both available in a hundreds or 200 megahertz version. Although granted, the Rygel Diaz 2000 series is available up to 300 megahertz, whereas this one doesn't only stops at 200.

But anyway, direct our apples-to-apples price comparison this one: 200 megahertz as we see it here today: 659 US bucks. the equivalent 200 megahertz that I've got here the 22:02 This is a slightly older one. This is not the A version. anyway.

they're practically identical. This one is seventeen hundred and ninety bucks. So the RAI goes 2.7 times the cost for the equivalent bandwidth. and these are street prices from the same supplier and 100 megahertz version of the Rye Goal: Seven hundred and ninety four bucks.

basically 800 bucks compared to five hundred bucks for this one. basically one point six times the cost. So great bandwidth bang per buck. II Assuming it's any good, let's take a look at it.

and just for kicks if you want to see your size comparison between the Rye Goldie's 1050 to Zed with its up four channels, it's not a huge amount wider and it's maybe I don't know an inch taller. Now first up, in terms of build quality, it feels and looks really quite solid. It actually looks pretty jazzy, pretty well-designed All the buttons are possible so we'll see if those Center later. It's got reasonable feeling tilting feed on it.

It's kind of does the business doesn't tip over when you hit the top there and soft power button. It's got USB on the front to save on the bed. It's got a reasonable carry handle and on the back we're looking at a wave gene or pass/fail trigger out USB and Ethernet as standard as well. Excellent that everything's coming standard with Ethernet these days.

As you can see, it's hot off the production line. It's one of the first units I don't even know if it's a production unit actually. I could be like a, you know, a pre production run or something like that. anyway.

I'm interesting that they've got the calibration sticker sort of embedded in there. that's interesting and the bottom of it's got nice big rubber feet at the back. It's got rubber on the front as well if you don't use the tilting bail like that and the rotary encoders feel pretty good. There's no indents in the other controls and I I guess I Kind of prefer it that way.

No big deal at all. I Like that's got the dedicated intensity adjustment control on here and everything seems actually quite well laid out on it. I Mean we've got our two individual vertical you control for each channel. They're specifically lined up right on the B and C's very, very nice now.

horizontal here. This is interesting. A horizontal is lined up with our external trigger I Probably would have put the trigger in there and put the horizontal over there. perhaps? Yeah, it's neither here nor there, but the grouping of the controls very nice.

We've got our run stop right up here. exactly where you want it. It's got both an auto setup and a default I Want a live? Would like to have seen maybe the auto setup recess, but here you know: I'm not Auto setup Fanboy: I'm a bit old-school in that respect. Yes, it's got a wave Jen option This one.

The hardware's in there, but it does not have the software options so we can't do that. It's got optional Syria where decode which is a software option and why they have the digital button. there are four. the MSO Version: when the hardware physically does not have it and you can't upgrade it I Don't know.

Anyway, nice grouping of the menu buttons here. We've got a history button for the segmented replay. we'll take a look at Clear Sweeps dedicated Clear Button: Default Factory default button: curses, measurements, Everything. It's all there.

It's a rather nicely grouped and laid out front panel. don't mind it at all. And yes, it does have a fan on it, but it is not as loud as the uh try Goldy S2000 series. I Can't really get a good quantity of measurements here in the lab, but yeah, that's you.

know. it's pretty quiet. it's not that bad at all. Standby Power Consumption: 8.8 watts.

Are you kidding me? You can fight a bloody Pluto on eight point Eight watts. Let's have a look at the apparent power. Seventeen point Four watts Awful standby power consumption. Ah goodness.

12 watts when it's booting up? Still going 14? It's saying nominal 50 watts on the back. but yeah, 22.2 watts operational 23. There we go. As a comparison, there's the Rygel Wah standby power consumption: 1.6 watts.

That's what it should be. Alright, Boot up speed Comparison: Here we go: When are siglent just under well, 9 seconds, just under 10 seconds. The Rygel's still going there. We go now.

Of course, there's one glaring omission in that it doesn't have the auto probe to tech for your times 10 probes. But hey, Nova deserve a goal. And hey, this is a six hundred and five hundred dollar scope so you don't really expect it to have it. But killer.

It's got 50 ohm input impedance modes switchable as standard. fantastic for a 600 but class scope now. Both scopes have 500 micro volts per division. Beauty: I Love this new trend of 500 micro volt per division vertical range and I've set them both to 7k points.

Sample memory here. Normal acquisition Everything as you can see, the Sigma appears to having lower noise floor than the Rygel, but that's appearance-wise It's got dual the update rate and the memory death and you can actually see a difference. If I change the memory depth here, you'll see that we get more apparent noise. You can start to see some of the variable intensity display in there as well.

When once you go up to 700 K sample memory and 7 Meg sample memory. there we go. but yep, it appears to be low noise there. Let's call them equivalent cuz we don't know about the update rates yet.

As you can see, both scopes have 14 horizontal divisions across. Fantastic! I Love that because to get the wide screen display, they've both got 800 by 480 resolution screen 8 inch displays. Absolutely identical displays on this and it's hard to get the brightness right here, so don't worry about brightness comparisons. We'll do that in a minute.

Let's just say I Think the siglent is probably front on the Cygnet seedlings a bit brighter. But the good thing about the siglent is that it's not wasting the amps and screen space over here that the Rai goal is dedicates to this horizontal and vertical measurement menu here. and also, you'll notice that it is chopping off part of the well one division there when you get rid of the menu. So there you go.

Whereas the Seedling it's yet. it's a fixed menu so you can't actually turn the side menu off here. but you're not losing anything. you always get in the 14 divisions.

Much better than the Rygel And yes, just like the Rye go and most scopes on the market if you are turned on the second channel it haves at the moment. Here we go we're at 10 Meg samples per second, 14 K points turn on the second channel we have 2 5 Meg samples and 7 k points. So our sample rate haves and our memory hives by turning on the second channel but that's par for the course. One thing I don't like is all the buttons on this scope.

look. you can barely tell they're even lit. look I mean yeah I've got some reason ly bright studio lights in here. what if I got a thousand Lux on the bench at the moment but still these are not bright at all I don't know some people complain about are the oh you know the buttons are too bright but hey check out the Rygel I mean it's even worse.

Look at this like yeah just God Unbelievable. could get like a lid on a button. Jeez I'm really starting to like the user interface on this thing. It's just clean and uncluttered.

We've always got the sample rate and the amount of memory displayed. There's all our trigger information channel 1, rising edge, the current level, the couple in DC Yes, it's got a hardware out frequency count up here which will no doubt try out Channel 1 and Channel 2. They're color coded properly shows that we've got the 1 Meg interface look. we can switch between one Megan 50 Ohms there it is.

absolutely fantastic. Doesn't really change the noise performance of that at all. and it's telling us our current vertical offset as well as I said you can push those to Center those back. There's a little bit of offset there on Channel 2.

We might be able to calibrate that out, but you kind of sort of expect that on a 500 micro volts per division. Now, one interesting thing is that when you turn the control like this, you get this for a couple of seconds telling you your positional offset and that's actually kind of nice. I Don't know whether or not in continued use, it might be annoying. I'm not sure if you can turn it off, but it's kind of a nice feature in it.

Then it just pops away. Hmm yes, we've got our trigger level here. pops up with a trigger line of course and then that just goes away. And the good thing is when you move the channel, the trigger line pops up very nice and it's got you.

use your soft menus down the bottom which the Reigle of course has the ones on the side with. It's kind of quirky user interface I prefer these soft buttons down the bottom I Never liked the the wry gold buttons down the side of here, but anyway, it's standard coupling Ac/dc and ground. I can't hear a real a clicking there for those. Bandwidth limit is just your regular 20 Meg your a probe adjustment.

Easy to go through like that. very simple but of course you can use your in your selection adjust knob up here if you want and yes you have to push it. but I don't I'm not really detecting any sort of you know problems when you push that and it you know being a bit Dicky it seems to work just fine in vertical Channel To here we've got volts and amps off. you've got a current probe you can do that.

we can deskew of course and we can invert our channel. So do all the regular stuff and the probes well. they feel a bit cheaper and oh they don't is still a lot of coffins. Typical work times: 1 times 10 switchable passives that you get and you're just your regular.

Joe Bloggs assortment of colour code and your high frequency probe attached. That's about it. And of course your horizontal were delayed sweep. You just push the horizontal control and it works just as you'd expect, just like any other scope.

No worries whatsoever with that and you can push it the horizontal back. you go back to the centre. Perfect. There's one thing that's not obvious here.

There's no menu button for the horizontal controls. so where is like your XY display mode? Okay, so there's a roll button. We can go into roll mode. That's great.

No problems whatsoever. but like, how do we get into XY mode? Scratch that. I Found it. It's in their choir menu over here.

XY Mode There we go on. Bingo, No worries and well, that's one of the things you get when you don't spend the money. I mean the sample rate? one gig sample per second you have put turned both channels on you? Harvard and there's only 500 Meg You can't even like you're barely getting your Nyquist sample rate for your 200 megahertz bandwidth. So yeah, in terms of you know, a 200 megahertz bandwidth scope to do signal fidelity measurements with the sample rates just not high enough.

and it's got no equivalent time sampling either. So if you want if you had a repetitive waveform but it's got all the normal stuff it's got not normal Peter takt average and ear is there is actually enhance I believe I'm guessing that stands for enhanced resolution which is the high resolution boxcar average in moving, average in mode and in terms of control responsiveness. I've had no issues whatsoever with this. it's it's just it's very nice.

It's pretty much you know instant exactly what you'd expect if we have a look at the trigger options. Going to the setup menu here here's all the different types: I Like this look, it pops up with the the help. By the way, there is no Help button on this see can't just hold down a button and it gives you help So that's actually a big disadvantage compared to the Reigle watt scope for example, which has you know, extensive help, built-in and other scopes. Anyway, we've got our edge triggering.

We've got slope. We've got pulse width fantastic with your requisite video. when it leads, it will trigger when the signal leaves the windowed region. We've got interval when the signal disappears for longer than the dropout value runt pulse triggering very nice.

We can do pattern triggering so your typical wired, digital and or type things and your serial triggering so that's not too shabby for a 500 bucks scope. All right, everyone wants to see what the super phosphorous Ulla scope is like. Let's check out the variable intensity and to test this out. I've got C Glantz brand-spanking-new hot off the press like first one in the country as well the 2000 X-series touch screen siglent function true ARB waveform generator hundred and 20 megahertz 1.2 gig samples per second haha Looks really nice.

haven't even looked at the price of this I Just like this one I think it's the first in the country and Charles didn't even take it out of the box so it does work I Have not used it yet but this is brand spankin so this is their new X-series G's takes a while to boot. Twiddle your thumbs. Jeez, it's only a bloody herb gen. what's it running? Ah, there we go.

We're in like Flynn and does it work? Yes it is. but yeah, why bother when you've got the buttons there? I'm sure the touchscreen is useful for something anyway. Waveforms: there we go Sign: Haven't even used it. so I'm just sticking through here.

We want. Well, actually sorry, we don't want a modulation. We want frequency. We want one megahertz.

Thank you very much. So this is literally right out of the box. How easy is it to use? We want Am modulation. Fantastic Internal source: I Am Depth: We want A hundred percent.

Yes, we're at a hundred percent already. No workers and that's it At one. Sorry. At a frequency of AM frequency.

we want one Kilohertz. That's my standard test signal and Bob's your uncle. We turn the output on and Tada Here we go. Let's check it out, see if the auto set can handle that, Shall we? Just for kicks? Most don't Oh well, it's triggered.

but yeah, it's gone. It's gone in. But there we go. there's our signal.

It will take some triggering. Most scopes are really picky with this. That's actually not too bad at all. Go out.

Whoops. I've got some alias in there, but that will be because we are not on. Um, well see. this is actually another I guess.

No. actually it. Yeah, it is a bit of a fire. It doesn't have auto memory depth.

You've got to manually select it and you'll see that we can. Here we go right. If we go right out like that, you can see that we're now getting that with 14 points. No problems.

and when course we've only 14 K points, it's just going to a Lea sit. can't do it. So 140 K and 1.4 Meg but there's no Auto memory depth selection. That's pretty disappointing, but holy Dooley Take a look at that display.

that variable intensity sleigh looks really good. Is there another annoying thing I've noticed is that the variable intensity display knob doesn't do anything when it's not, when it's not selected when it's not available as a selection for scrolling through menus or whatever. I Reckon it should switch to the intensity adjustment, but to do the intensity, you got to go into display persistence and then you've actually got to go into intensity and then you can dig around with it like that. But anyway, yeah, that's kind of like a user interface fail I think but Jesus display looks nice.

haha. So stop that and that's a pretty decent variable intensity display. I'll tell you that for nothing, look at that. It's not.

Probably it's got 256 levels, but you can see it's no. it's probably. Let me compare it with the Riga and you see, the Reigai was still the Ducks guts in that area, but this is pretty close I Got no problems with that at all. That's nice.

just look at the sharpness in there and here's what I was telling you about with the Auto memory diff. go into the acquire menu here and when you've got memory debt set to auto, you'll notice that we can't alias on this at all on this signal at all. The auto memory depth mode just chooses the right amount of memory. It doesn't let you well.

Granted, it does have an anti alias mode which the siglent doesn't but see, even with the only alias off, the auto, memory depth just handles that. No problems at all. but you know if you manually set it to the 14k points, you get exactly the same issue we saw on the siglent, so you know you can force it to do that. But yeah, that's what the auto memory depth on most everyday uses.

You can actually leave it on that you can't do that on the signalling, you've got to choose your poison. actually. I'll tell you what. I'm going to stand corrected on this: I think I'm like even though you don't get those bits in that like you know those different shade in intensity level differences, it's got better shade in, but you can actually see horizontal.

sort of like horizontal lines through that. It's actually not as crisp as the siglent. So I'm I don't know I don't know. it's hard to call, but G's not.

Sigma's pretty good variable intensity display. That's all you need to know. I've noticed one little quirk: Look at the hardware frequency counter net counter here. It's almost bang on.

Okay, no, but we're not going to quibble over a couple of these significant digits there. But look, what happens when I change the horizontal look at jumps down to nine Ninety and Nine 79 63. It jumps all over the shop until it eventually comes good again. But for a second or two, they're changing the horizontal.

It it fails. So yeah, you kind of sort of get the same thing on the vertical as well. Just change by, you know, and like 500 kilo at 700 kilohertz or something. but that's interesting.

Not sure what's going on there now. I Was a bit confused here for a bit trying to measure the waveform update rate because the siglent is supposed to have an excellent 60,000 waveform updates per second, right? Really quick. That's like it's banner spec. so I'm measuring down here.

Okay, I've got feeding in my standard 1 megahertz our test signal. That's what you do when you measure the waveform update rate. Okay, I've got on the smallest amount of memory. I've got, you know, like the fastest time base, right? Everything right? It should be.

It should be pretty good, but I'm only getting sorry that this is hard to see. I'm only getting like 1112 kilohertz down here and so what the hell is going on? Look regardless of what time base setting I Put on there. Okay, it's you know when once you go down to lower settings, of course it's going to be. You know it's going to jump out to.

you know 2 kilohertz. You know the 2,000 waveform updates per second. It's going to get slower. but on the fastest horizontal time base setting, that's the best I could get.

Unfortunately I can't make that frequency thing bigger I Thought there was an option. Anyway, that's about 9 kilohertz. And look, that's only with a single channel. If we actually turn the second channel on, it basically halves.

So there you go. Waveform update rate lives with the second channel now. But where? Where's our 60,000 waveform updates per second? I couldn't get it. and then I Figured it out.

If you go into the display persistence menu here, we can go into the type and we're on vectors at the moment. Okay, if we change the dots. Aha, look at our update rate. Bingo! we're at 20k now.

Okay, so the fastest time base we're at 20 kilohertz, 19 points something? haha. 45 kilohertz at 5 nanoseconds per division, 25 kilohertz, and 25 if we go down. Bingo. Look, we found a sweet spot at 50 nanoseconds upper division with the lowest memory depth of 7-7 K.

But it's down to 700 K points because of the one key sample per second. And Bingo! we're at 71 kilohertz, so it does exceed spec, but only on basically one range. That's it. One horizontal time base range and you have to put dot mode on instead of vectors.

Unbelievable. Anyway, there we go. That's in dot mode. You'll see the dots though.

The reason you don't see the dots is because we haven't stopped. If you stop it, there we go. Bingo! You can actually see the dots there, so that's the difference. But yeah, that makes a big difference to the update rate.

but everyone runs it in standard vector mode. So yeah, there's some marketing wank for you. 60,000 waveform updates per second? Yeah, not not really in practice, mind you, the Rygel is potentially worse in this regard. Look I've now got it swapped around.

so I'm measuring our trigger frequency out from our R I go down here exactly the same. I Found the sweet Spot 47 in Kilohertz. Those 47,000 waveform updates per second on the Reigai here, but that's single channel. Look what happens if we turn on Channel 2? Ah, it's shocking a job from that for a drop by like an almost audit like order of magnitude.

10 times what? The I Don't remember trying that before, but yeah, geez, the update rate of the ROI Go really sucks ass when you have that second channel. In that respect, the suit ones much better. I Haven't tried this before, but just like the signalling up here, the right goal does actually change its update rate to whether or not you're in dot or vectors mode. Vectors Mode 47 just over 47 point 1 Kilohertz they're put in dots doesn't change a huge amount, but it does actually go up a bit to Fifty Two Point Seven.

And just like the siglent, you do need a sweet spot there. So even like at the fastest time base rate 25 kilohertz there we go. 16 kilohertz, 10 and then bingo you find the sweet spot in the time base. Based on the memory depth acquisition, all that sort of stuff that you get your highest update rate.

So the verdict on that one is ah, the C : I'd say it's got to be slower because in normal vector mode that everyone uses, it doesn't get anywhere near its claimed 60,000 waveform updates per second. So where is the you know? Rygel At least it keeps up that performance. So yeah, but still, this is not a slow scope, so we'll actually try some glitch pulses on this and have a look. Now let me show you a very cool feature we can actually measure.

will hopefully confirm I Haven't tried it yet the waveform update rate of this thing using the History Display mode. Now we've got that one megahertz signal on a time base which has given us around about 10 kilohertz there. So pretty darn close to 10 kilohertz trigger frequency. Let's see if we can verify that.

Okay, so what we're doing Okay, the Scopes just operated normally. Here we go and we're going to actually press the history button on the front one. Bother showing you? but let me press the history button that will automatically stop the scope and capture in this particular case are 80,000 frames. So this is the segmented memory you know history capture waveform capture feature that like the Rygel has and the agile and they have almost every scope on the market has this these days, even low-end ones.

But watch this right! Oh I'll just actually I'll just show you this mode right? If we have a look at the I'll show you the knob here and we can see that we can actually scroll through and you can see slight changes on the waveform there cuz it's the same waveform every time but you know it can go through nice and smooth. But look at the velocity control of this thing. well if we spin that fast, whoa that counts up really nice and quick look at that. So the velocity control they've implemented that Perfect.

So hats off to them. arm and once again we can actually set the the inter the playback interval for example. So if we wanted to set it for you know I don't know 50 odd milliseconds we can go through and play that bingo and there we go where replay mode. but the theme feature I wonder is really really nice.

Look at this and I haven't seen this before or any scope I don't think anyway I'm unless you try and extract the data it's got this list mode and look it has the history number like it got down here but it's got the acquisition time - one microsecond resolution. Hmm. so check it out. How awesome is that? So if we just actually yeah, can we stop that, pause it.

There we go and we can see that. what's the difference? There we go. Our acquisition time. you know, minutes Boop And then we've got one microsecond resolution.

So what is that? - 10 - 3 11? So that's a hundred and one microseconds. And of course, a hundred and one microseconds. invert that on our calculator. What do we get? Bingo.

Nine Point Nine Kilohertz. Exactly. The update. Well, basically the update rate will see in on the scope there, so that's confirmed.

So when you got normal vector mode on this scope turned on, it certainly is Ten thousand waveform updates per second maximum. That's on one sweet spot on the time base, but you know that's still okay. For a like, it's a $500 scope. It's pretty darn good.

When I was a boy, geez, No, there's 10,000 waveform updates per second. Rubbish. Jeez, you're lucky if you got 50 and I Completely forgot to show you the color intensity upgraded display as well. There it is so you can get and in fact, if you turn on infinite persistence, there we go and we can.

That's what our we can use our clear sweeps button on the front to clear that, but there you go, we can get our nice for those color intensity greater display fanboys. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of it. it's useful in some situations, but anyway. so there we go.

We can clear the sweeps on there and that's with that infinite persistence there. We can just clear that, no problems at all. But yeah, it's got color or just your regular monochrome. Beautiful.

I'm pretty sure I Have not seen that on a sub thousand-dollar scope before and this is a 500 bucks scope. Even the hundred megahertz model has this. and if we give it our next to impossible to find one glitch way, we got one. We go one one glitch every million cycles.

So with only 10,000 waveform updates per second, and, well, I don't exactly know, but it's near there. Yeah, we're not going to pick it up in too infrequently as I said, we should pick it up more often in dot mode. There we go. It just immediately popped up.

I've got infinite persistence here. We can clear the sweep on that and what. There we go. Popped it again, so that's actually pretty good.

That's not bad at all. That's one glitch in every million, so it's not doing too shabby. And if you go into history mode here, my cache at 45,000 waveforms here. maybe we'll find it if you, If you sit there long enough, you might be able to capture one.

Oh, it's much easier to turn. infinite persistence. sad display on. That's what it's for now.

hold on to your hats folks! I Have found a really interesting mode for going to the acquire menu. There's a mode called sequence okay and I was very confused by this at first and I thought it was. you know I like some other segmented memory mode because it's C you know it's sequence or whatever and it says got segments You can actually go in there and set the number of segments at this particular time base I can go up to a thousand 24 segments and I it was very confusing. It didn't work like segmented memories.

I Read the manual and what this is is a emote wet. When you switch this thing on, you can probably actually go in there and maybe see it. Okay, we'll switch it off. Maybe we'll see.

No, this is not a good one for seeing how fast the updates are. Raider Yeah, here we go. we can just see the update right here when we turn it on, the update rate is actually much much slower because what it's doing is delaying the updating of the screen and then just BAM waveform to memory wave on to memory. Boom-boom-boom as many it's using like you know, segmented so to speak.

To get higher waveform update rate they claim in the menu up to three hundred thousand, Three hundred thirty thousand waveforms per second which is phenomenal. Um, but I can't find any of that in my run pot. Where's my one-in-a-million glitch? I should be getting that now, but I can't And even if, like in the manual, it tells you, okay, we'll use history mode. Okay, so let's turn on all thousand and 24.

Look, I'm not capturing any of those any of that one-in-a-million glitch pulse like I was catcher in before when I had this mode off with 10,000 samples per second. It's crazy. So even in history mode, if I go BAM Like that. Okay, we stored our thousand and 24.

I've checked that that matches up and we can actually replay that. and oh, here we go. Start from one, Replay it and I still haven't captured anything, but it actually does. Check this out.

it actually does have the update rate, in fact, faster than what they're claiming. I'm getting now 440 6000 waveform updates per second and that'll actually change if I adjust the time-based that that was on 15 and a second time base. That seems to be the sweet spot. it's 357 Kilohertz or thousand 357,000 waveform updates per second and that seems to be the sweet spot.

But wow, that is a ridiculously fast waveform up to right And it's sure enough in here, it does the business, but it doesn't capture a one-in-a-million glitchy that you'd expect to see it all the time. but it's not there. Why? Bizarre? I don't know what's going on and we can turn our list on and well, yeah, what are we down to three? Okay, we're down to three microseconds, three microseconds per waveform update. And sure enough, three microseconds.

You can do that in your head. There you go. invert that on calculation of 333,000 waveform updates per second and you can actually see the functionality of this mode. when I change the number of segments I set.

Look I can change that to one and then we get one pulse like that. Okay, this is the trigger out. Okay, no problems whatsoever. so it does the one trigger.

But look, we'll go to 2 to 3 and then we increase the number of pulses and that is it. That frequency of 357,000 waveform updates per second? Ok, so that's look that's great. So you can actually see that working in real time. which is fantastic.

Ok, but I'm not seeing my glitch on here and it doesn't matter whether I'm in top mode, vector mode, or whatever. and of course the penny just dropped like duh, it really is too late. Yes, it is 10:20 p.m. on a Friday night.

Isn't that sad? Um, yeah, of course. Yeah, we are getting now. Um, you know, well in this case, well time base There There we go, we can get actually 400,000 waveform updates per second. You know, Fantastic, right? But that's only in this segmented acquire capture mode.

The reason that we're not seeing our one-in-a-million pulse down here is because of the massive dead time. Ok, yeah, it can capture that and it's not updating the screen, which is fine. And if you go into history mode, maybe you might be able to capture it in there somewhere. But you've got to remember that.

Look at the amount of dead. Now if I don't have to go out. Crikey that? What's that frequency there? That's 50 milliseconds per division, 100 200, 250 milliseconds like quarter of a second. A quarter of a second dead time and there.

and we can only capture up to a thousand. Sorry. Well, at this time base or we're only getting in a thousand and 24 that we can capture. Okay, so uh, so if the one-in-a-million pulse happens to occur in that in the region where it's sampling, then bingo, you'll get it.

and you might I don't often display it on the slate, might have to use history mode to get it, but the odds of it coming up and not good. So while that sounds impressive, that update rate and it is for segmented capture mode. Okay, but for real practical purposes of capturing a very infrequent glitch like this one in a million one, it's essentially useless. And it's actually worse as I showed.

If I actually turn that off, then I'm actually going to get look I have much less dead time up here. Much less dead time. So the chances of actually capturing that glitch pulse are much better. Bingo there it is, right! We actually got it right fairly quickly.

So yeah, it's a case of faster update rate, not necessarily better. It's all about the dead time. and if we have a look at serial decode on here I've got set I squared C buses just outputting some data. This is just a demo signal and it seems to decode it fine and match the same serial decoding on my A Geling 3000 X-series which I'll show you here in a second.

and yep, just take note of those and here it is actually live updating on the signal here. Just note the second one there. two four, six A. That's it's slow updating.

Let me show you that on the Agilent it because this does not have real-time hardware updating so it's not going to be deep. be able to decode it in real time. Now here's the Agilent on the live signal. You can see it's actually counting up there.

I Think it's One, Two Four eight sequence there and so like you know, it's capturing the data, its decoding it. Okay, but the Agilent 3000 X-series here has real-time hardware decoding so there's no software overhead at all so I can capture or and decode all the data in real time whereas the you know, the cheap seedling and other scopes that don't have hardware decoding can't do that. Yeah, it's one interesting little quirk here if you actually hit I, fit in another signal into here instead of the I squared C but I'm still in serial decode mode. Can we actually see that button? Geez, other knife I don't think it's on actually.

yes, that's weird actually. I was in serial decoding. Oh ok, serial decode is just for that anyway. Um, if you press Auto set up here, check it out.

It doesn't actually take you out of decode mode or various other modes. It won't actually take you out of when you do auto setup if you want to. Actually, it's because it's got the default button here and all. I set up Auto setup keeps some certain modes and I wouldn't haven't gone through all various combinations to find out now.

default actually won't do that ever, which is rather weird, but default will actually reset some other modes to take you back. so you still have to go in there and manually disable the the event screen here. Oh, actually, hang on folks. I Found I Found a firmware bug.

look I can't turn the list display off or on look doesn't it? It's off the list display is off, but it hasn't. It hasn't vanished. So what the hell is going What that was going on or I set up. press default.

it. Sure, default should go back to. um, you know, like the live default mode that presumably you can set up I haven't tried do that. but I can't get rid of this list display now.

Um yeah. seriously. I cannot get rid of that list to slay. It is locked up so it looks like I haven't to repeat it but looks like if you go, do your auto setup or well yeah, I did Auto setup while in this mode it stays there.

Weird. I think I'm gonna have to turn the scope off I can't see another way to do it I really can't decode is off I'm triggering on base, gone back to edge. Everything's hunky-dory but nah so yeah. I think they need to fix that.

Whoops! Okay, what I'm going to do here is have a crack at the runt triggering because it's got all these nice trigger types. and I've got a signal going in there that has a runt pulse and Bingo! it's triggering off the runt pulse because I've already set it up. And what's nice here? we can go for the limit, rein, various limit types and then the next page. Here we can set our upper and lower limit.

Also be confused for a second I thought I'd have to use the knob up here to adjust that and but know it because it hasn't actually lit up to tell me. Now you have to actually use the trigger level adjustment. Okay, no problem at all and we can set up our two different levels there for our run poll. so we're basically getting something in between there like that and Bingo! We are triggering off that little runt pulse there.

so we've got run pulse there. there and we've got a bottom one down here and we can actually trigger off that one too if we rot one two. let's go in and have a look and there we go. So all we got to do is go back because that will be a negative polarity.

Bingo. there we go. I've triggered off our negative runt pulse works a treat. No worries.

and let's just do a quick pulse response comparison with the Rygel Here they're both the same are two hundred megahertz analog bandwidth. So pretty much apples and apples. and I'm just feeding in a ten megahertz a square wave. I've got a 50 ohm terminated I'm not using the internal 50 ohm terminator, so we'll use an identical match terminator for both scopes and interestingly, watch what happens if I turn on Channel 2 because we have the sample rate up here.

Bingo Where you know we're upsetting the effective bandwidth of the thing. Then watch. see the subtle little difference in the subtle change they're in. they're in the response to that.

I Know it's not much, but it goes to show that the math works right. You got less sample rate, you're going to get less signal fidelity, and there you go. That's on the Rygaards. Neither here nor there.

Yeah, you know, no. basically. I'm looking for gross pulse response problems. their honor here.

for those playing along at home, the Agilent 3000 X-series but hey, that's 500 megahertz bandwidth. Well I had an issue with the look. the displayers display is locked up. Something's going.

Something's going on. I was just turning the time base quickly and a beep. That mean like it got to the end of the sequence. It's like it's some sort of velocity.

Well ok where we instantly entered role mode there. Ok I'm not sure. now it's not. Now it's not triggering.

Um oh no, no, no there we go. Ok, no, sorry, we sweat down too horribly. Slow time base: Oh no no, it just looks like it couldn't recover from that slow time base setting that had velocity control on the horizontal. I Think that's the problem and it was going too quick.

Yeah. I think that's what. I Think that's what happened there and it was trying to do a slope time base and it just couldn't. You know it would not and turn in the control.

Maybe didn't reset that? Hmm. let's see if we can do it again. Ready? Nope. And then no.

let's come back. No see, look, look see 200 nanoseconds per division and it takes a little bit to come back. Certain weird some weirdness happening there in the firmware. I Think Ok I Thought I'd just sweep the analog input here with my RF signal and find the actual and log bandwidth of this thing.

None about none of this rubbish about feeding in a pulse in point 3 5 and all that sort of formula. So we've got a hundred and hundred and fifty eight megahertz. There it is at the moment. I Set it to one volt peak-to-peak So we're looking at the frequency where this drops down to 0.707 It's supposed to have a 200 megahertz bandwidth.

and let's note where. well, we're at 200 megahertz now and it's basically still the same. So we're up to 250 megahertz and well, yeah, we drop through. No hang on.

Can't read that. It's a tiny font. I Thought it was a six, but it's not. It's an eight.

I Should be reading the top here. Here we go: Oh Point Seven. Oh seven. Now minus 3 DB bandwidth.

Well the wave forms getting a bit how you doing there, but you know we're looking at a good 300 megahertz at a log bandwidth. No worries at all, that's a winner. But if you're wondering why the waveform looks crap like that, it's not my signal generator. I've got a very expensive Marconi 1.2 gig signal generator the 20:23 It's because if we actually go in and it's our sample rate, it's that pesky one gig sample per second there.

It just doesn't cut the mustard. For the you know, the 200 megahertz bandwidth this thing. It's a real shame. It's probably the the major problem with this scope.

if there is one today. There we go. We're in dot mode. There we go.

and of course if we stop it, then you can actually see the difference between the vectors and the dots. As you can see, we don't have many dots to fill in the blanks there. And then we've got our sine X on X interpolation. which is we can need to go out of dot mode.

Ah, more men using a poke a stick at there we go Vectors that's without our sine X on X And if we go in here and we can say as our sine X on X There you go. Magic. Look at that. But hey, the math works out on the sine X on X You need roughly four times the analog bandwidth in sample rate.

So a 200mm megahertz scope here really needs an 800 megahertz sample rate. and this thing does have it. the one gig sample per second, but only on the one channel. If you use two channels, it halves.

So if we switch to our dot mode and we turn on our second channel I think we'll be shocked. Look at that. we can't display are three other big signal anymore. Oh goodness, we probably can't even display.

Probably have trouble with our two hundred Meg's So there we go. There's our analog bandwidth. There's our two hundred megahertz. This thing is supposed to be three DB Down at two hundred megahertz, we measure that three DB down three hundred.

So it's better than what you expect. But that sample rate kills you. It just absolutely kills you. And if we turn it back to vector.

okay, you know, but look what happens when we turn on your second Channel Wah fail. Okay, we've got to go down. We don't get a normal looking waveform until about a hundred. As I said, about a hundred and twenty five megahertz.

one quarter one. you know, one on four. In fact, that is a brilliant I Like that I might do this a separate video. Maybe that is an excellent example of using sine X on x interpolation and why you need one quarter are four times the bandwidth in sample rate.

There you go at 125 megahertz, which is that four times everything's hunky-dory We go over that and it starts to look pretty crappy. and I haven't actually covered the cursors yet. but the cursors. You know, all your typical stuff is in there.

Oh, you know you can go Auto track and things like that and it seems to do the business. so I wrote won't really cover that too much. The measure menu yes, it does have statistics fantastic with the state of standard deviation and the count. and you can clear that with the Clear button on the front here.

so that's brilliant. That's all working the treat and this menu is interesting. Look, we can actually select all the stuff we want down the bottom here. It's a little bit fiddly in.

Here's where I found that the knob? If you didn't you know you got to press it. They've got a few weird acronyms like I'm Fov for example is our overshoot after overshoot after the falling edge and FP Re is the overshoot before falling air just like what that. Anyway, it's got quite a lot of functionality in the the measurement mode, so you know no problems whatsoever and it all displays it down there and you get your stats. It's all pretty standard.

The Rygel is a bit more powerful in these statistics are part of it. You can get histograms and lists and all sorts of stuff, so you know, but hey, this is still pretty good for a 500 bucks scope. But of course, one of the coolest features is that it's actually got gated as well. So you can actually gate where.

what that means is you put these cursors where you I don't know how to eat? Yep, Cursor A There we go. Got to select. At first you can actually select which part of the waveform you want to actually take the measurement from either. Usually it's from like the full screen so you know data, but if you just want a specific part, gating is very powerful for our cursor measurement for any cursor and automated type measurements.

Excellent and a quick check of the math. FFT mode, shall we? we? Let's turn that on. There we go. we're Operation plus Tada FFT we're in like Flynn that has done that's, done The business.

Yep, no problem whatsoever that looks alright. Can we measure? And it's good that we can choose the split display or the full screen. That's pretty neat and we've got all the requisite windows. Yep, good a Blackman and I can't find an easy way to use the cursors to measure that frequency like there's no um, you know FFT type mode function, find the next peak and all that sort of jazz like, um, you know that nice some Rohde & Schwarz one was it that we looked at her for just last week at the trade show.

So nothing like that. It's just basic. No. I don't Maybe it is in there.

it's too late. I give up. Anyway, there you go. That's been a rather lengthy look at the new Siglent X-series Thank you very much to chose at Trio Test and Measurement here in Sydney for uploading me this puppy I believe I'm going to eventually be getting one from Siglent that's the word.

but yeah, it could be towards the end of the year or something like that. so I can have a play around this one. We'll have to go back fairly shortly. I Can't keep it indefinitely and hopefully I'll do a teardown on it as well as when to play with it today to show people I know I'm supposed to, you know, not turned on, take it apart, that kind of stuff.

But anyway I Wanted to get a first impressions video up on this thing before I potentially ruin it by taking apart I'm sure I won't but yeah Charles is it gets a bit worried about his little baby Anyway, the Cygwin X-series um, it's a few sees me a few little firmware quirks, so I hope they can fix those because the previous STS 2000 series apparently was a nice hardware. but there, the lot of reports on the forum haven't really been following it, but apparently as far as I'm aware, there were a lot of reports on the forum of lots of firmware issues which they hadn't fixed. Anyway, hopefully they'll be fixing those and but this is a reasonably solid scope I don't mind it at all if I can figure out how to bloody turn the mouth off I can't just double? Yes I can. It's a little bit slow there, but otherwise, it's actually a very, quite a quick and responsive scope.

But really I think the major limitation is the sample rate. One gig sample per second for a 200 megahertz scope doesn't quite cut it, but hey, you can't complain about the price. What was it? Six hundred and fifty nine bucks for the two hundred meet one and 499 for the hundred megahertz version. Wow So although this is not really bottomed entry-level art scope at 499, it's getting there.

so it's basically a hundred bucks more than the $399 Roy gold Es 1054 Uh, Z this thing yet. you're the the 499 250 megahertz. A lot of people hack these things up to 100 megahertz and all the bells and whistles and but the 1054 Zed Not a direct comparison, but I I would still go for the 1054. Zed If you're in the market for an entry-level scope because you get the four channels, that's a killer feature.

It's got all the bells and whistles can be hacked up to 100 mega. Hertz is the siglent. it is not software upgradeable front if you buy the 100, it's not software upgradeable to the 200 megahertz as far as I know and that's a big downer. I Don't know why they haven't provided that option.

Maybe they will in the future or I'm wrong I don't know. So there are no hacks for this thing as far as I am aware so you know you buy the 100 megahertz version. It's 100 bucks more than this. but this has the four channels.

I Guess it comes down to if you were considering these two which they're not really equivalent. This one has the much bigger screen much more in a kind of more usable. It's got the separate vertical channels but you sacrifice the two extra channels on there. So yeah, does have the external trigger though, which the 1054 Zere doesn't but actually there's a thread on the EEV blog forum at the moment.

Why do you need four channels over the two channels? Well, it all comes down to usability during troubleshooting, because often you want to say use one channel for measuring your power supply. for example, another one for measuring the signal under test, another one for measuring some reset line you're looking to debug you're trying to catch a glitch and Cree and time across correlate them across all the four channels. So for channel scopes are very handy when you need it. But hey, if you, this is the real competition to the siglent and well, it blows it away.

It's got the same basically the same sample memory at 14 Meg 40 mega. but the Rygel has double the sample rate. That's the killer, but this thing is much much cheaper than the right gold Mm. So really, you know if you had to pick between those I don't know.

It's got separate waveform replay and stuff like that and I Yeah, geez, you can't beat this one. For the price, it's pretty good. This one might lick the Rygel I think unless you really need that sample rate I'd probably be gone for the siglent at this stage. Anyway, that's my first impression.

I've only been not playing around with it for the 4 or 5 hours I've been shooting this video and had to go home In the mean time and I came back so hence why it's late. there we go. 11:30 now. Oh goodness.

Anyway, first impressions are few firmware issues, but geez, killer price. shame about the sample rate though. Catch you next time you.