Hi welcome to the Eev blog an Electronics Engineering Video blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics design. I'm your host Dave Jones Hi It's product review time again and not just any product reviewed because I'm super excited about this one. Why? Well, not only is it an oscilloscope, a brand spanking new one, but I've got a world first. Nobody else has this.

I'm the first to review it. So what is it? It's the brand spanking new Agilant 2000 series oscilloscope. Oh, check it out. Isn't it just beautiful? look at that? Yes, it definitely is.

Sex on a Stick and it comes out today. and thanks to Agilant I have one of the very first units to roll off the production line. So let's check it out now. Adelent makes some really bold claims about this new low-end series of Scopes they got.

It's actually two series. it's the 2000 series which is this one and the uh, more Upm Market model which is the 3000 Series as well which I've also got, but you'll see that in another review so we'll stick to the 2000 for this one. now. This is their new entry level scope.

Uh, designed for you know, hobbyists, Uh University teaching environments, people on a budget and they claim that it actually redefines oscilloscopes. The redefines the entire Market It's a bold claim. Does it live up to it? Well, well find out, but it is very attractively priced. It's got some Rip snort, new technology, and best of all, it's designed and built inhouse by Agilant.

That's right. No longer are they rebadging the Ryo models cuz everyone knows that the 1000 series uh, Agilant Oscilloscopes were just their low-end Their existing previous low-end model were just rebadged Ryol and well, that was always curious. Everyone was saying, oh, why did Agilant do that? You know, just rebadging some, you know, cheap Chinese Brand Ascope. What are they doing? They've lost the plot.

all that sort of stuff. Well I reckon though I don't know, but I reckon they'll probably just doing that to buy their time while they were designing this baby because this is completely in-house designed and manufactured by Agilant. The Asic which is used in here, which we'll go into designed inhouse by Adelent. that's the heart of the new technology manufactured in Adelent plant in Malaysia it's got nothing to do with Rol or any other one.

They've gone back inhouse and I Love it. Now the new 2000 series model is the Infin Vision model. So Agilant are now going to Uh brand all their oscilloscopes in Vision across the entire range. And because of this new technology which enables Uh better performance at a lower price point, it means that there's lots of overlap with their existing oscilloscope models.

So they're going to drop not only the Ryal 1000 series. Of course, they're going to drop their 3,000 series and their 5,000 series models as well. So though all their models from now on will be Infin Vision technology, and uh, so you'll have the 2,000 series, the 3,000 series, The 6000 series, and so on. right up to the end of the Stratosphere, the ones that cost the same as a new house and one of the claims they make with these new models is that they're the industry's first fully upgradable upgradeable oscilloscope.

So you buy your entry level model which is the 70 MHz uh. model two Channels with no logic analyzer, no anything else, no options, and then you can option it up to the hilt later through. uh, not Hardware upgrades but actually software upgrades. You guess it, Everyone's doing it these days.

These software upgrades so you just you know, feed your credit card number on the internet. They give you a license code, you plug it in and the options enabled. That means that the base model you buy actually has all of the hardware actually built in it's got which will go into the new waveform generator. Super excited about that, the logic analyzer, mixed signal capability, the four channels, everything is all and the bandwidth as well as all built in.

And it's just purely a software upgrade. Now it comes in three different bandwidth vers. the base model is 70 MHz, then 100 MHz, then 200 MHz and quite frankly I don't know why they bothered with the 70 MZ version. What's with that? why not just make it 100 and then 200? Bit stupid.

Anyway, um they all come. All the models come stand with uh 2 gig sample per second and of course it has a mixed signal capability. It's got the logic analyzer down here which is eight channels. It's 16 channels on the Uh 3000 Series model, the totally different Uh series, the upgraded one, but this one's only eight channels.

Little bit disappointing, but it is mixed signal capability which is awesome. Pretty standard in Scopes these days. but one of their huge features is a waveform generator output and we'll go into that in much more detail later. but that's super exciting.

The first scopes on the market to have a waveform generator output and all the models come standard with 100 kiloby of memory, which isn't as much as some of the low-end scopes on the market. They're all going to 1 Meg or 2 Meg sample memory. But the reason this one's only got 100K is because the update rate and this is the huge selling point with these new series, the 2000 and the 3000 Series The waveform update rate is incredible. It's five uh, 50,000 waveforms per second.

A for a $1,200 oscilloscope. You got to be kidding me. So that's really the main selling point of these new Scopes They've got phenomenal update rate capability. They're super quick, which previously, you wouldn't have got that sort of speed unless you paid $5,000 or $10,000 for a scope.

So to get this in their bottom of the range 70 MHz unit for 1,200 bucks is just phenomenal. It's gamechanging now. normally at this point I get so excited that I wouldn't turn it on I'd take it apart but won't do that in this review because I really want to save that for its own separate review and I'll do a tear down of this thing properly so that'll be in the next video. Now to give you an idea of the size of this unit: I've got it compared to a standard Ry Go here or the Agilant 1000 series scope and as you can see it, it's up on its tilting Bale here and it is a fair bit bigger as you'd expect with a much larger display.

but it's uh, the depth of the actual unit is actually the same as the Ryo at its uh deepest part here, so its footprint isn't Actually there's no more extra depth to it, but is just a bit more width and a bit more height. Of course, Height's not a problem because it doesn't tap up take up extra uh footprint on your bench. which is what it's all about. footprint in terms of weight.

Um, the uh. the new agilant weighs a fair bit more. It's about 3.8 kilos. It's almost topping 4 kilos when you include the probes and everything, so it has got quite a bit of heft to it.

But uh, that makes it sit on the bench all the better. And there's the depth of it. As you can see, it's pretty much identical. it's really no deeper than a standard Ryol.

When you first look at the unit, you really are impressed. Just the design and the construction. quality of this theme is first class. It really is.

I'm thoroughly impressed with this. The uh, the handle on the top sort of snaps into place like that. It's a really nice design. The uh, tilting feet on the bottom are real quality.

real Class Act Um, there's no issues with that at all. It's got nice big feet on the it's got plastic feet on the front like this and rubber feet on the bottom like that's so. It really sits on the bench very well and you can sort of poke at the buttons. Without Really Any issues at all, You poke the ones up the top here and it doesn't really fall over.

It's quite. It's quite a stable unit on the bench, and of course the case designers have gone a little bit funky on this. It's got this lovely curved side on it like that and it just looks really brilliant. It is sex on a stick.

It's got this nice little cutout area like this and as you can see, it's got a USB device interface for hooking up the PC It's got a second USB host for a USB stick. It's got one on the front so that's just a duplicate. you can put it on the back to not sort of clutter the front so that's nice design aspect. It's got trigger out for the function generator.

It's got an external trigger in. As you'd expect, there's a calibration thing there I'm not actually uh, sure what aspect of the calibration that takes care of. and on the back here is a key lock mechanism so you can actually stop people stealing it I don't know how well that works and there's a little pop out uh module like this and you can actually buy uh external modules for this now. I Was quite disappointed by this.

This is actually a Lan and a VGA interface module and this is optional extra. Of course it doesn't come with it and it just plugs in like that. It's really nice, but I was quite disappointed that those that the Lan and the VGA functionality weren't actually built in to the scope and I believe the only other module you can get for it is a old school Gpib. So if you want to run some Legacy gear, not not a problem.

and on the back here is a large fan which is actually angled sort of to come out the side like that and it really is whisper quiet. I'm very, very impressed by the uh, low noise output from the fan and of course is one of the huge features of this scope is the incredibly large screen. It's one of the largest in its class, especially on these economy uh Scopes It's 8 1/2 in Uh diagonal. It's uh Wvga which is 800x 480 res resolution and we'll take a look at that in a minute.

but the uh layout of the unit is quite conventional. You've got your four channels here. if you only buy the two channels, then only two are functional, but you will get four with it. And you've got the separate vertical controls which I love I hate uh scopes with which have just a single vertical control like on the Ryol the 1000 series.

Uh, Agilant, it's got the single vertical input and you have to select between them. This one's got the four separate ones. One of the things I immediately noticed is that they didn't actually line up with the connectors down here and I thought that's you know that wasn't that great a design decision, but I guess uh, you have to. You know it's a trade-off between the total length of it and the fact that you got this huge screen on there and you have to space out the connectors, etc.

etc. So I guess that's just a minor little Quirk that I noticed. One of the nice aspects of the Uh input connectors is that they're actually fully color coded. So yellow, green, blue, and what's that? Sort of like an orange type color to color code the the actual channels and that will reflect on the screen as well.

so it's really easy to identify your individual channels and the rest of the control layout is a little bit uh Crowder but it is um, organized quite well and it is quite functional. You've got your trigger uh settings here, you've got uh, your measurement settings in the center and over Here you've got your special functions for your serial decod code, your digital mixed signal channels, your math and your reference waveforms, and they've got their own uh, convenient, um, vertical and uh, select buttons as well. and your horizontal is all up here in the section. you got your horizontal Zoom, your delayed timebase of search capability which is not on this one and navigation as well which will go into and your traditional runstop uh, single control buttons, default setup, and auto scale which is sort of uh, buried down in there.

Now one of the things I like about the auto scale on this thing. I'm anti- Auto scale because it means you cheat and you don't use your oscilloscope properly. um, especially for students, you can actually disable that in the firmware. Teachers can actually turn that off so that the students can't while the teachers got their back turn can't just press the auto scale button and get it to all work.

A great little uh feature and all of the buttons are pushable as well. They all have a secondary push function which is really quite nice and they've got an excellent feel to them. They've got like a rubber outer surround on them. They really do feel like quality controls.

They're all Optical rotary encoders of course and I like it. It's just gives you a real sense that it's uh designed well and they're using quality components. Quality: Plastics Quality rubbers as you'd expect from someone like Adelin and along the bottom. Because this is a mixed signal oscilloscope, we've got a standard uh .1 in uh IDE type uh interface which uses the standard uh agilant probes.

We've got a USB key host on the front. Interestingly, we got demo 1 and demo 2 outputs which will go into they're not just Uh standard calibration signal outputs and the huge selling feature on this one is the optional signal generator output which we'll go into in detail as well. And it's got a real manual push button which actually turns off the mains. Um, it's got six soft buttons along the front with your back key here.

So the overall interface is actually very nice. I Like it. It's well laid out, it's well designed, and I'm impressed. The input connectors on the 2000 series don't have the Uh SMART connector uh interface, the smart probe interface that's only on the 3,000 series model, and here's an interesting sticker on the back, which tells you a lot.

It tells you it's running Windows CE 6.0 Now that's nothing to be scared of I Know you might think oh, windows in an oscilloscope? Oh, it's horrid. but uh, really, you don't notice at end. For such an incredibly complex instrument like today's modern. Scopes You really do need a proper operating system like Windows C to run it.

One really nice aspect of the scope on the top is this little enclosure. Here you pop it open and that's for your probes. I Really like it. Nicely thought through, but it fits two probes rather nicely.

There's two probes in there plus the accessories, but does it fit four? Let's try it cuz this is a four Channel scope. just. ah jeez, that was tough. but I don't know.

it's a big dodge. You can just fit four probes in there if you try. and what do you get in the Box Well, you get uh, the standard probes. Now on the 70 and the 100 MHz model, you get 150 MHz Time 10 passive probe.

Because this is the 200 MHz model, you get the 300 MHz uh time 10 passive probe and it's quite nice. It comes with the usual uh adapters and it comes with a bag of uh bits. You've got uh, the alignment tool. You've got a BNC adapter which is quite nice.

You got all the colorcoded uh things to match the front panel. You've got two extra uh probe tips plus you've got the uh, low inductance, uh, ground, uh clip as well. and you also get a calibration certificate ific which is fantastic. It actually comes with the with the actual sticker so you can put the next due date on there and actually stick that on your scope.

Unfortunately, it doesn't uh come with the full parametric test so all the measurements that were actually performed but still for 1,200 Buck scope. it's great to see that you get a cow certificate with it. And of course, if you pay $700 and get the logic analyzer option, you get the Lovely Agilant Logic Analyzer Probes. These are um I'm pretty sure they're the same ones that are used on um, all their ranges of Scopes These look like the same ones I have for the 54 621d that I used to have and they're lovely.

All they're all uh numbered individual probes. They've got standard um Uh1 in Uh pin hooks on the end so you can plug those directly into the test points. You've got some spare ground attachments and the easy hooks as well. They're very nice logic analyzer probes and even nicer.

Check it out made in USA and the easy hook as well. made in good old Us OFA Okay, let's boot this thing up and see what we get. It does take a little while to boot up now. I Think these LEDs up here for the Run stop and single mode.

Ah, there's the new Asic inside the that's where all the magic happens. This is the new Asic They're using their real high-end Uh models. The same technology is filtered down into these: uh, low-end Uh $1,200 ENT level models. It's incredible.

Anyway, it's now taken 20. it's almost 30 seconds to boot up. so it does take a little while with Windows C and it's got to do initialization and all that sort of stuff, so that's pretty annoying. That's just over 30 seconds.

But the screen is brilliant. Uh, it's not quite as bright as say, the Ryo unit. If you try and compare them here, it's probably it doesn't show up on camera that well, especially in low light. Uh, the Ry Go does have a much brighter screen, but this one is just gorgeous.

It is a beautiful display. uh, 800 by 480, so that means there's no pixel compression in the waveform at all now. I think the Run stop and the single LEDs up here. they're actually a little too bright.

probably doesn't show up on camera, but in sort of low lower light situations. and Labs they're quite bright. So I think they might need to drop that down a bit. But anyway, minor complaint.

Um, you can, of course. Uh, basic operation is just like any. um, agilant. Uh, DSO They've had the very similar operation for um God oh, more than a decade now.

So as you can see, this is the four Channel unit. so we can just turn on all four channels like that. No problems at all. And on the display side of things, you'll see that the, um, the vertical setting is actually they've got the same colors so yellow, green, blue, and uh, what is it pink I think it is.

Um, they match the four channels so that's quite nice. And this is a permanent display down the side here. Now it permanently shows the acquisition, uh, speed. It's currently at 1 gig sample per second.

Now this is actually um, advertised as a 2 gig sample per second unit, but unsurprisingly, that's in interleaved mode on a single channel. So as soon as you turn on the second Channel you'll see the 2 gig samples per second drop to 1 gig sample. But that doesn't drop any further if you turn on the other two channels. As far as I can find, there's no way to actually turn off.

uh, this particular display panel here, so you can't um, very disappointedly can't expand the horizontal out by another couple of Divisions and see more on the screen I don't know why they chose not to disable that I think that's a bit disappointing and I think they should probably, uh, fix that in a firmware upgrade, but that's just my personal opinion and it would have been nice if they had soft buttons down the side here as well cuz during operation I have found that um, several of the operations you have had to go back to the main to access the soft keys You' had to go back into things to actually get through it so if they stayed on the vertical soft buttons like uh, many oscilloscopes have then that would have been a much better user interface. But at the moment you've only got the six soft keys down the bottom so everything must go through there. So if you go into the math screen for example, then you can't have still have the math screen up and go into the vertical as well. And here's an artifact of the fact that these Scopes come embedded with everything regardless of what's actually in them.

and two really annoying things. Check this out. It's got serial decode mode up here. remember I've got the topof the line fully equipped model and to prove that we'll go down into the help and we'll go into about oscilloscope.

And here's my unit. it's got the land VGA It's got all the software options, it's fully optioned up to the hill. This is the best 2000 series model you can get, but if you hit the serial button what does it say? Serial bus Dcode is not available on the Infin Vision 2000, but they've still got the button there. Same with the Uh search capability.

up here you press search event search is not available in Infinity Vision 2000. Crazy! You got to go up to the 3000 Series model, but the buttons are all still there. One really nice feature of the vertical channels is if you want to move them back to the center, you just push the vertical adjust button and they all Center Very nice. And likewise with the horizontal shift, if you've actually adjusted the the delay time of the horizontal like that, you can just push it to zero back.

And of course, with the phenomenal 50,000 waveform updates per second, this thing might take 30 seconds to boot up. but it is lightning quick in operation and that is one of the first things that you actually notice. It is very, very quick and very very responsive. just like you'd get in a very high-end professional, you know, $10,000 plus uh, oscilloscope.

I Love it! And a quirk that's not uncommon in digital oscilloscopes when you change the vertical division. it often has to switch in a relay and you can physically hear it and that actually takes time to switch the channel. So you do get artifacts like that, but that's really worst that's You know, that's pretty much worst case. As you can see, if I actually plug in the waveform and I get that up and then I switch through, There's no, you know, there's much less of a problem with that.

Now, one of the most phenomenal aspects of this new scope are these training signals. If I go into help, it's got a whole. it's got training signals and it's got Auto demo signals. Now, if we go into training signals here and we call up this list here, check out all these training signals we've got which appear on the Dis display.

We've got sign of course sign with noise uh, superimposed. We've got phase shifted sign sign with glitch amplitude modulated S Wave RF burst. We've got repetitive pulses Ringin clock. Ah, digital burst digital burst burst with infrequent glitch.

Unbelievable. This is fantastic for not only uh, uh, training you know, universities, schools, things like that to teach people how to use oscilloscopes, but it's actually surprisingly handy for real world use. Uh, if you haven't used this scope for a while, or you're trying to, uh, for example, set up an elus, a trigger for an elusive uh glitch, or run pulse or something like that. Uh, the last.

That only happens maybe once a day or even once a week and you're trying to capture that. The last thing you want is to set up your oscilloscope incorrectly and then actually miss that. So what you can do is use these training signals to actually set up the Uh, set up the trigger that you actually want. Test it, make sure it all works, make sure you know exactly how you're driving the scope before you actually sit there and try and monitor and catch you your glitch glitch in your real circuit so it has much more function functionality.

Beyond Just uh, schools and training I Love it! It's a brilliant feature. Every scope on the market should have built in training signals and one of the great things is you can just hold down the button over the Uh function that you want and it gives you info about it, what it can be used for the application and how to actually do it. and you can do an auto setup as well. It's just phenomenal.

So if we go in here and choose say RF burst and we hold down the button, it's going to tell us what that's good for. It can be used to show the benefit of segmented memory application to catch your occurrences of bursts, or if you've got um, say sign with Uh glitch on it, then there we go. That shows you how to use the Uh, the benefit of peak detect in acquisition mode. It tells you exactly what signal it's going to generate.

Ah, Fantastic! And let's go into help again. And let's choose the Auto demo. so it tells you exactly how to configure the probes on there like that. I've only got one probe configured but that doesn't matter and You' got different options Update Rate MSO Segmented Memory Mass Test waveform generation and you can actually apply all of these Uh items and it will auto set up your scope for you.

So if we go back, exit and say we want to test update rate Now this will tell you it generates a signal one uh, one glitch or different waveform every 50,000 um Cycles So this shows the update capability of the scope and here's the big feature. Okay, this as you can see, we're generating this one in 50, ,000 glitch. Now this has got 50,000 waveform updates per second, so you would expect it to capture on average. uh, at least one of those glitches every second.

And as you can see it, well, it, it actually does it faster than that. It actually captures them. And if you you can see it in this mode here that it's glitching like that and you may think oh well, what's the big deal But uhhuh, we'll compare it to an ordinary scope in a minute and you can see that's the glitch waveform that it actually captures. Now on a normal scope to capture something like that, a really, uh, infrequent glitch like that is incredibly difficult.

Uh, especially on a DSO that only has a couple hundred or a couple of thousand waveform updates per second. Because this has got 50,000 it's phenomenally quick, it easily captures that, and if you go in and adjust the intensity, okay, I've got it at 100% at the moment. But as you can see, it really, um, goes down. so it works exactly like an analog oscilloscope.

It's got that persistence uh, kind of feature based on the intensity. So you increase the intensity and that line gets thicker and thicker. And if you turn it down, if you've got a little trap, if you've got your intensity down, you can barely see that little glitch I can just see it. Not sure if it shows up on camera there, but um, now the way you normally overcome that on a normal scope to find such infrequent glitches is not only to in turn your intensity up, but actually turn your persistence mode on.

If your digital scope has a persistence mode, what you want is infinite persistence like that and as you can see it's we can actually clear it, boom, and it starts building up and it doesn't erase the image on the screen as you can see even with a low intensity like this. If we clear it, we're still going to capture that event and as you can see, you can actually see the noise around the waveform as well. when you turn the intensity down and that analog like, uh, variable intensity. In this case.

For this C scope, it's got 64 different um shades of intensity that it can actually give you. Um, so that's like analog likee performance, which you traditionally have only gotten on extremely expensive 5 or $110,000 plus oscilloscopes, but now you can get it for just over 1,000 bucks. It's phenomenal. And just to show you what 50,000 wave for updates per second can do, as you can see: I've got the glitch here and this is in real time mode.

Okay, it's in real time mode and you can see the glitch clearly. It pops up more than once per second, so it's obviously capturing that pretty easily. I've got exactly the same signal fed into the Ryo here or the Agilant 1000 series. Now, this doesn't uh, specify how many waveform updates per second, but the upgraded model to this the one you pay a lot more for, has only a couple of thousand wave form updates per second.

And as you can see, I've got the intensity up to maximum there and you can stare at that thing all bloody day. and you are not going to capture that one in 50,000 glitch, You're just not going to do it. The Ryers have turned on infinite persistence, so if when this is actually sampling its waveform a couple hundred or you know, a, times per second or something like that, which I don't think this one goes that quick, but if it happens to capture that little run glitch like that, then it should show up and it should stay on the display now. I'm going to time that sucker to actually see how long it takes, but it hasn't shown up yet.

Come on, What are you waiting for? Bingo There it is. We finally got it. After more than a minute it finally showed up and I just did a second one and it also took about a minute. So you can actually conclude that this ryal if you do the math, 50,000 waveforms per second in about a minute, That's just over 800 waveforms per second for the Agilant 1000.

Series So this is just a simple example. Sure, you can find the same pulse in in around a minute on the Ral, but if you've got a much more elusive pulse than this, then, well, this thing. our 50,000 waveform updates per second is really going to allow you to capture it, whereas something like a low-end scope simply will not do it. You could wait weeks or forever until the cows come home and you still won't capture you Glit, so it really pays.

It's worth paying extra to have a super fast update rate like this. Here's an example of its mixed signal capability. We've got a digital waveform which is actually generating a Sidal signal. This is the Um.

This is the direct output from the Dack and this is the filtered version here. and these are the digital signals D1 through to D7 And as you can see, it's actually got a Serial decode here. if you zoom in, it actually gives you the hexadecimal value for that particular uh word at that particular point. and as you can see, you can actually see maybe you can't on the video.

but you can see the shimmy the the Uh Jitter on the signal there and it really is very, very nice. But that's the kind of thing you can do with a mixed signal oscilloscope. You can see uh, time correlated signals between your analog and your digital channels. Now if you press the digital button over here, these two controls become active and they control the selection of your digital channels.

So this one here actually allows you to select. it turns red. Select the waveform. Now this is the standard agilant uh mix signal interface they've had for a long time.

and then you can move. Once you've selected the waveform, then you can move it around like that. You can change the size of them like that to take up more screen real estate if you want. And as you can see, it has different colors here for the one and the zero level.

and that's really handy so that you don't get the waveforms confused when you've got a whole bunch of them on the screen at once. And of course you can label them as well and you can. It's got bus capabilities, You can set up individual buses, you can deselect, you can uh Base information as um, hex or binary. So now we've got the binary information there instead of the hex and it really is quite a nice uh, usable mixed signal.

uh. Digital Logic analyzer I Like it and the label interface is the same. If you press the label button here, you can actually select any one of the individual channels, the math references, or the digital channels in this case. So if we go down and we select D7, we can go in and then we can actually, um, spell we can select the letter bang, something like that and we can label it anything we like or we can actually and we can apply the new label.

Or we can select a uh, one of these predefined options down here. So if we know that signal is actually a clock, we can actually select clock and apply new label and Bingo! You can see that channel is now labeled clock. so it's worth when you set up a digital Lo logic analyzer like this. It's worth just spending five minutes going through labeling your signal so you know exactly which one is want.

Trust me, a real trap for young players is to not label your signals. And this screen real estate I was talking about over here really comes in uh, really is a factor when you start looking at uh, long time signals like digital, uh, logic analyzer s uh signals for example. It' be great if we had that extra real estate to see the data off in there. One really nice feature is this transitional display down here.

Now you can actually see digital signals 0 through 7 and that tells you if they're high, low, or transitioning and that's means you don't have to look at the display up here. You can instantly see whether or not uh, there's any glitches on your individual channels or whether or not they're transitioning what state they're in. Really handy. One excellent feature is this: Auto Navigation function down here.

Now if you get a bunch of data on the screen like this and you stop your acquisition like this, normally you can zoom in like that and you can, you know, scroll along like that manually, but that's boring. If you're looking for something, you just hit the navigate button and you can just scroll left and right like that. So that's an incredibly handy feature. It just allows you to scroll through and your entire 100 in this case.

100K Point waveform memory and actually find the data or whatever you're actually looking for and it any point you can stop it like that, you can go back and it's just. ah. it's beautiful and if you want to speed it up, you just press the arrow button again and Bingo! You can make it go as fast or as slow as you want. And of course it's got measurement capability.

So if you hit the measure button here, you get up the Measure Men menu and you can choose which one you actually want to measure. Let's say we want to measure uh, channel number one. What type do we want? These are the different types of measurements you can get. There's a whole bunch of them.

Phase delay Rise full time yada yada yada RMS things average overshoots H Peak min max boom and you can go snapshot all as well. So let's go snapshot and it gives us complete snapshot of that particular data. And as you can see, it will actually track auto track. In this case, we've got the peak-to peak value being displayed here and the frequency and you can add uh, different measurement options as well.

You can just choose the different type measurement and it will add it to the measurement menu down here. Now one of the things I'm quite disappointed about is the frequency counter. It's not a true hardware frequency counter like you get on, say the $400 uh, Ryo or 1,000 series agant. It's clearly a software one based on the data because if we go in here and we've got no edges, Bingo it's no edges.

There's no Hardware frequency counter and you'll see the digits drop as we drop the uh as we drop the time base like that that it continually goes down. That proves that it's a software frequency counter. Very disappointed. I expected with this new whizbang Asic They would have put a hardware frequency counter in there.

Of course, one of the big problems with digital storage oscilloscopes is alias in. Now some uh, oscilloscopes really can't handle it at all, but this one can. And to prove it, I've got a 20 MHz sine wave going down here and if we turn the time base right down, you can see that it's not going to Ali us and give us a low frequency signal. We're at 500.

We're at 1 second per division now and it's still um, you know you can't obviously. Uh, stop that and zoom in. but it's not going to Alias So if we stop that and zoom in, it's just. you know it's pretty much gobbley go.

but it's not going to Alias on us and give us a a signwave like you'll get on say the Ryo unit so it won't fool you into thinking that you've got a different frequency than uh than what you truly have. And just to show you Alis in here on the rol scope, I got the same 20 MHz sine wave. Okay, now let's turn down that time base and bingo as you can see what it gets to a point where instead of showing you just the full display, it starts displaying Tada a sine wave and you think that you've actually got a sine wave of that frequency, but you don't that's alias in and the new Agilant scope doesn't do it. So that's a real trap for young players on these cheap oscilloscopes that Alias now if you actually stop that look, you can even capture that and it's 2 milliseconds per division.

That's not our 20 MHz sine wave. It's lying to us. and let's try out the network interface. I've got it hooked up to my PC here, but you can have it hooked up to pretty much a Network anywhere and if we go into utility menu we go into IO.

It gives us the IP address so so we can actually type in and it actually takes a bit of time to connect. But you'll eventually get to the web page for the oscilloscope and it's quite a nice interface. We can actually identify the scope by hitting the identify button here and this is good if you got multiple Scopes set up in your lab. you can, uh, figure out which one you're actually talking to and it's a rather nice interface.

You can configure the network stuff down here. You've got instrument utilities you can look at the installed options that you've got. You can look at the firmware version the way it looks like we can run some apps. You can get a screen image straight away.

Bang! That's a screen capture directly from the scope instantly. Very nice. You can save recall stuff and of course you can fully control the oscilloscope remotely. you hit remote interface and Bang! There It Is Here's the remote front panel for the scope.

so we can. Yeah, it's trust me. It's actually got the scope next to me and is actually reflecting on the screen of the oscilloscope. Exactly what we're doing here.

Um, so the control layout. It doesn't actually look like the real scope. The control layout is different. The horizontal time base you can adjust it would have been nicer if the controls actually mapped the real oscilloscope.

I Really don't like these where they just change all of the layout. What's the point of that? Have a real screen capture of the oscilloscope? That's the proper way to do it. But anyway, you can do everything you can Auto scale. You can do anything, operate all the menus.

You can do everything you normally would uh with the regular scope. I Like it now. I'm not sure what the update rate of the connection is, but I'm actually doing that Auto Demo function with the Run pulse and there's supposed to be a run pulse there and I can see it on the oscilloscope over here. but it's not showing up quick enough so that shows that.

The refresh rate. Um, really, you can't make use of that phenomenal update rate and I think that's a bit of a shame now. Interestingly what that same run pole shows up in the mask testing? So I was going to show you this on the oscilloscope, but I'll actually show you it on the PC menu. You've got this mask capability so you can actually Define a mask around the waveform at a certain value and uh, this is great for production testing and things like that to make sure waveforms are within a certain specified tolerance and as you can see, anything that fails in in the gray area here actually shows up as red and it gives you total stats too.

Look It's Already Done 3 million tests shows the date and time, the failure rate in percentage, the sigma um, and you can reset those statistic. So look, it's already done 100,000 bang in a couple of seconds. That's how many tests it can do per second and this updates via the remote interface. It's quite phenomenal.

I Love it! One of the remarkable things about the new Agilant Scopes is that the waveform updating really won't slow down with this Mass testing because of this new whizbang Asic they got in there. It just, you know, it doesn't have to do this in software. it actually can do it uh, inside the Asic itself. So these normally computational intensive tasks like Mass testing really don't slow down the machine like they would on a traditional oscilloscope.

That's one of these the main advantages of this new Uh Asic and these new modern Scopes I Love it. And I've got it Hooked up to a 22in external VGA display here using the optional VGA module and it just duplicates what's on the scope. Uh, the scope display is still there, so it is a true Uh dual display capability, but unfortunately it doesn't give you any extra uh screen real estate at all. It just duplicates what's on the scope and it works quite well.

No problems at all. Yet another awesome feature of this new scope is what's called segmented memory acquisition. Now where this comes in handy is if you've got uh bursts of data like this separated by lots of Dead period very long dead time periods like that which I used to have in my um, seismic and underwater business when I was working in. That sort of stuff you'd have like an acoustic shot here.

Then you might wait 10 seconds for another acoustic shot. And if you want to analyze those particular shots in detail, then you need a massive amount of sample. Mar hundreds of megabytes, Uh, you know, gigabytes of highspeed sample memory. To do it and to get a scope with that much memory cost 50 or $100,000 Or it may not even be possible if the time periods are long enough.

So let's actually give this a go here. What segmented memory does is it only captures the actual bursts of data that you're interested in. and it doesn't waste all of its precious sample memory capturing non-existent data. So let's give it a go.

And this is what these individual bursts do. and you can actually cycle through each each burst of data and then analyze them in detail, which was next to impossible to do. knew this before God I wish I had this when I was working in the seismic industry would have been phenomenal and you get this on a $1,000 class oscilloscope. Unbelievable! One of the huge points of differentiation with the new agilant Scopes is the build-in waveform generator which is worth its waiting gold to have a function generator building the scope.

It's so obvious and awesome and that's built into the new Asic. It's actually got a waveform generator built in now. as you can see, it can generate sign Square triangle, uh, pulse, ramp, all sorts of stuff, noise as well uh as well as DC signals and it's really is quite remarkable. It's got a bandwidth of 20 MHz which is quite phenomenal, so a 20 MHz uh function generator would normally set you back $500 or $1,000 Now unfortunately, the generator option does actually cost $500 so it's it doesn't actually come with the scope and it can actually be routed through to these demo signals here as you can see.

but this main BNC output is for the function generator so let's have a real play with it. I Got the probe hooked up to the waveform generator output and you press the wave gen button here and that switches on your waveform generator and as you can see you can select your different types sign Square, ramp, pulse, DC, and noise and you set the frequency uh, the frequency fine as well and you can adjust that no problems at all. It works just like a regular function generator. The amplitude uh can be anywhere up to 5 vs Peak to Peak.

It can go right down to Molt region so and you can specify the DC offset as well. Let's go into the settings: the output load impedance can be high impedance or 50 ohms which is important to have of course and you've got uh trigger outputs that you can set up so that the Uh BNC connector on the back of the scope here uh can generates a trigger signal in um to that's synchronized to your function generator output. It's quite nice, and if you're a student, you would have noticed that there's one thing missing from the selection of waveforms and that's an arbitrary mode. Now I Reckon that this the As is very capable of actually doing arbitrary waveforms and it makes sense to have why they didn't do this.

I'll get into but um, to be able to say, capture the input with the analog signal, store it as an arbitary waveform and then output on the function generator. That would have been phenomenal capability. Phenomenally powerful and is the reason behind why you can buy arbitrary waveform generators that hook up to oscilloscopes. But I reckon it was a deliberate decision by adelent.

This is my guess and my guess only is that they deliberately decided not to put arbitary waveform capability in there cuz they then this instrument would be too powerful and it would eat into the sales of their function generators and agilant make a lot of function generators. So I reckon somebody at the function generator division had, you know, spoke in the ear of the oscilloscope designers and went, don't you dare put uh, arbitrary waveform capability in that scope otherwise you'll put us out of business. It's a real shame Agilant shame. There's a quick action button here which you can actually set up and Define So it's like, uh, you can switch it on and you can, uh, quick measurement.

all. so if you want to switch down to there, let's select that so that anytime you want you can now just press that and bingo up. Pop the quick measurements. Quite a nice function so it's a user definable soft key and I Really like having the default setup button up here.

You can actually set up the scope to a default setting and then bang. You just hit that and it goes back to what you set it up for. And that's useful for production or test environments where you, uh, you know, someone borrows your oscilloscope, but you've got one favorite setting that you want you can program in there. When it comes back, just hit the default and you're sweet.

There a couple of puzzling aspects with this scope. Now check it out if you, uh, select the vertical menu coupling right on. Every almost every oscilloscope you'll ever use, it has AC DC and ground coupling? Well, let's try this one. It's got DC and AC that's it.

There is no ground cing, which is remarkable because in the spec sheet it actually says it does do ground capability, but in the manual it doesn't. So somebody put it into the spec sheet and just didn't carry through the firmware why they've left it out I Have no idea. And as with all decently powerful oscilloscopes, you can actually go in and Define your probes and you can actually set up not only the Uh type, you can actually set uh, the ratio in De. you can actually set it to decibel as well.

um, the units in volts or amps for Uh current probes and you can set the probe skew as well so you can actually match the probes. Uh, if you got different types of probes or you want to actually calibrate them just right. Curiously, adelent have actually ditched the Uh equivalent time sampling capab Ility, which you usually get in Dsos. so that's why you won't find a spec for an equivalent time sampling rate cuz there is no mode to do it.

it's purely a realtime digital storage oscilloscope Works In real time only. and if we go into the acquire menu over here, we can actually see that does normal P detect averaging and high resolution. Now high resolution is actually up to 12-bit mode. Um, it doesn't have a 12-bit converter, but it actually uses averaging on the Uh input in certain time base modes to give you a higher Fidelity waveform and that's a useful function.

And of course, as with all modern Scopes it's got math capability which allows you to choose Fft among the other options. It's got different function types and allows you to set the Uh Span frequency and the center frequency and the different Uh Windows types with all the usual selections, so it seems to work quite well. The update rate is uh, quite good, but as with all Fft functions in Scopes, it's really no substitute for a proper Spectrum analyzer not even close And I know what you're thinking with all this phenomenal update rate, what's it like viewing an analog Uh video signal? Well, let's check it out. I've got my Kodak Place board here generating a video signal and let's trigger on it.

So if we go to the trigger menu, of course you can't trigger on edge triggering. you got to have video triggering which it does bang. it locks straight in and bingo there's your video capability. It's actually quite nice.

You can trigger off Mtsc power, Ccam and all the different fields uh, alternate field, one field, two. all that sort of stuff you can do Field hold off and it works. really nice as you'd expect from a fast update rate oscope and you can choose your individual line number here. so I can scroll through those line numbers and then I start that's a static image and then if I start the image Bang There it goes that's actually playing back a video and as you'd expect with the USB capability plus the networking Uh interface, it can uh print print to a various Uh items.

So we go down to save recall and you can go format setup. You can get um 8bit bit maps, you can get a PNG file which is really nice. You can export the data in CSV format all sorts of different things Mass data, binary data, and somewhat curiously, if you hit the print button that actually is uh Network printing. so you've actually got a setup uh, network printer Cate Bill is if you want to save to a USB stick like this, you've actually got to go into save Recall and then you've got to go press to save and bingo it saves it to a PNG And let's check out the Uh Baseline noise performance because it doesn't have um ground coupling on the input.

I've disconnected the inputs here and uh, the probe is one to one. So as you can see 2 molts per division, it's basically got one full division or 2 molts of noise. But if we go into the acquire menu that's in normal mode, if we actually go into uh averaging mode, of course it uh, takes it all out. but if we go going into high resolution mode, it's about half that.

It's about 1 molt and you can see that difference even at 1 V per division. Yeah, noise is actually quite significant there in normal mode. If we go into high resolution mode, it's much better. One extra benefit of using the high resolution mode here is that it actually makes use of the samples.

Uh, one when you're at a lower uh time base uh, like this and a lower sample rate. It uses all those uh, dead samples that it would normally throw away. It would normally decimate those samples cuz it's a 2 gig sample per second converter. It always samples of that but because it's only uh, filling up the memory at 250 Meg samples per second is throwing away all those extra samples whereas the high resolution mode can actually make use of those and it does that inside the new Asic So you don't actually pay a performance penalty like you would in a in a regular oscilloscope that high.

has a high resolution mode and as you expect in the utility menu, it's got a whole bunch of stuff for setting up uh, the land Network file explorer. You can explore the USB stick or the internal memory. You can um, set up the clock and preferences like that. You can also go into the service menu.

It's got a hardware self test, user calibration. front panel test allows you to test all the buttons and the controls and the user calibration status. It tells you when it was last calibrated and the difference in temperature and on your serial number and all that sort of stuff. and it's got a whole bunch of um, other functions which if I went through them all, it would take a couple of hours instead of an hour for this review.

One feature I really think's missing on this scope that is in the $400 Ryo is uh, digital input, uh, filtering of the input signal so you can actually set up digital filters. Now that would have been easy to implement in such a high-end uh scope like this, they might have even been able to do it uh, in the Asic but they've chosen not to add any filtering capability at all. and I I think that's a bit of a shame. One thing I'm not really a fan of is the persistence mode on the display.

If you change the horizontal like that look, it doesn't clear the display so you've got all that information there that actually has no correlation at all to the current timebase setting that you've set. Other Scopes that I've uh used including the Ryol, They will actually reset the persistence whenever you change the horizontal and the same thing goes for the vertical as well. So just how quiet is this fan? Well, I've got my Uh Audio Level meter here and let's try out the Ryol almost about 60 DB it's a good 10db quieter. Let's take a look at some of the specs.

You can see all the different model numbers they got across here. 12 of them. Why they done that? It's crazy. Get rid of the 70 MHz model.

it's nuts. Anyway, Um, they come in two and four channels. Of course one gig sample per second per Channel guaranteed. but uh, it goes to 2 gig samples per second.

Inter Le If you if you're only using one channel, they've all got 100K points memory which is excellent. Uh, they've all got the 8 and 1/2 in display with 64 levels of intensity. They've all got 50,000 waveforms per second. Um, they've all you.

It's an 8bit Uh converter. Of course the vertical range goes from 2 Ms to 5 Ms per Division and there there are an asteris on there, but that does not uh limit the bandwidth. The bandwidth is still as claimed for the lower um uh vertical uh scales which um, some Scopes Once you get down to the 2 molt range or the 10 molt range, they can actually uh lower the bandwidth. but this scope doesn't and there's that input C coupling I was telling you about.

It says it does ground but it doesn't There's no option to actually do that. The logic analyzer part of it is 1 gig sample per second which is excellent. It supports all the standard stuff and you can use it Define the individual Uh trigger levels in 10 molt Uh steps which is excellent. Um, it does plus - 10 volts on the probe.

It's uh, you need at least 500 MTS before you can do anything at all 100K input impedance uh, pretty standard stuff and uh, maximum detectable pulse width is 5 nond so that is a lot different from the Uh analog section of the scope and the glitch capture on it is excellent. 500 p a seconds as you'd expect from the 2 gig sample per second and that's at all time base settings as well. and the high resolution Uh mode you get uh 12 bits resolution when it's greater than Uh 20 micros per Division and the rearm time for the segmented mode 19 micros if you're Keen in that sort of stuff. And the function generator's got extensive Uh specs as you'd expect, but it's basically Uh 1 Herz to 20 MHz Amplitude flatness plus -.5 DB harmonic Distortion 1% - 40 DB all pretty standard sort of stuff for this Uh class of you know.

20 MHz Uh Function Generator The square wave Jitter is 500 uh Peak a seconds. The Uh rise and fall time is 18 NS I Would have preferred Uh a faster rise and fall time to that, but that's what you get with these sort of generators. So the verdict on the new Agilant ,000 series Scopes Well, in a word, awesome. And do they live up to the Bold claims that they redefine the Ccope market.

I I Think there's a quite an element of truth to it? Yes, because God 50,000 waveform updates per second for just over 1,200 bucks is absolutely remarkable. I Compared this to a Um 3,000 Series Tectronics unit, which costs four times the price and it's only got 3,000 waveform updates per second. and I compared the update capture rate on the same signal and this is an order of magnitude better and all 10 times better. 10 times quicker.

It's just phenomenal. It's so responsive. Agilant have put a hell of a lot of thought and effort into these Scopes I think it's fantastic. and the fact that they've gone back inhouse and done everything themselves without uh, rebadging their low-end units is a fantastic step for forward.

and I do think it's a bit of a shame that they crippled some of the options in here, which they could have put in like the AR generator and maybe some digital filtering and stuff like that. They I don't know, they're conscious. uh. design design decisions? perhaps I don't know.

but anyway, I think they could have gone a hell of a lot further with this. They need to drop the 70 MHz model I Don't see the point in It Go for 100 MHz minimum so they aren't quite down at the you know, the $400 price point where you know some of the low-end Ry Gos and other Scopes are at, but that's not the market. This is phenomenally better performance for really not that much more money. I mean just over 1,000 bucks get you this capability which before you know I' I've had to spend 10 $15,000 on Dillos scope to get this kind of update rate and performance.

It's unbelievable and now it's coming down due to due to the technology. With the new Asic In this, they're actually uh, bringing the technology. into their low-end products and I Can't believe it And they've really laid down the gauntlet to the competition. I Don't think anyone can match them at the moment for phenomenal update rate.

For the price, it's incredible. Competition's got a lot of catching up to do. Let me tell you now, the base price of this unit is uh, recommended. Retail price is $1,230 or thereabouts us uh for the 70 MHz model dual Channel no logic analyzer a no function gen and then you start to throw on eh.

Here's where the catch is the Uh. They start out. The base price is very, very attractive and it's incredible value for money. But then you start paying okay, 500 bucks for the waveform generator option.

Uh, you know you can go out and buy for 500 bucks, you can go out and buy a fullon 20 MHz arbitary function generator from another company. You can't buy an Agilant one for that, but you can certainly get fully featured AR for five 500 bucks so you know it's a bit pricey. The logic analyzer plugin eight channel very nice, turns it into a beautiful mixed signal scope I Love it, but it's about $700 for that option. You want the Uh land capability as well.

there's another couple of hundred I think it's $400 for the land module and VGA module. So and don't mention the bandwidth upgrades and the agilant told me really not to tell the exact price prices because the exact prices are actually quite uh, flexible depending on the dealer you buy it from and all that sort of stuff. So I don't know what the street price of this thing is going to be for all the various options, it's too confusing, but the options are I think a bit expensive, but it is Agilent so. but the base model unit unbelievably good value at 1200 bucks.

Huge thumbs up I Love it! Now just because I think the modules are a little bit pricey, doesn't mean that the upper model units are not superb value for money as well. If you take a look at the Uh 4 Channel 200 mahz model, then it's around 2600. Retail Probably goes for a bit less than that on the street, but if you compare that to say, a Tectronics 2000 series also 200 MHz 4 channel model for effectively the same price blows it out of the water. It really does.

no contact test at all. Even if you start comparing it to say a Tech 3000 Series model which I don't think they actually compare this one to I think they're the the next model up in this, but this still runs rings around that. as I've said before and it's just God I Don't think there's any contest. These are superb value for money.

A winner. Heck, it's not even much more than a Ryo 4 Channel 200 MHz unit. Unbelievable. even when you're throwing the mixed signal logic analyzer capability which might take it up to over three grand, it's still uh, Dirt Cheap Compared to say, a Lcro Wavejet series or something like that, Value for Money is incredible.