Hi, We've got a brand spanking new Rygole. It's the Hto 4000 series and the nerds on the Eev blog forum are absolutely going to burst unless I open this thing up and do an unboxing and first impressions measurement type thing because this uses the new uh, Rygol Center chipset in this thing. Uh, the previous Phoenix chipset was the previous one. Isn't it? It's the new Centaur chipset and a it's a full 12-bit hardware uh, scope with an ultra low noise front end supposedly.

So that's what everyone wants me to uh, initially check out. so let's do an unboxing here. This is the Hdo 4000. They've actually got also a Hdo 1000 series which will be coming in another two weeks.

So if you want a lower cost one, check it out. This one starts from 26.99 us, but that's for four channels. 200 megahertz, our 12 bit, you know, touch screen, touchy feely, all the rest of it. so let's have a squeeze.

What else we got in the box? Nothing. So there we go. And yeah, it's black. and yeah, it's gonna.

I want to count the number of fonts on it. Um, because of course, Rygall are famous for not exactly having the greatest, uh, industrial designers in terms of like look and feel. anyway. um, any color you like, as long as it's black, There it is.

This is the uh, 200 Megahertz model. Yes, so this is the 2699 us dollar model. I don't know if it's a software or hardware bandwidth upgradeable, but uh, for 36.99 there's the 400 Megahertz version. And for 46.99 is the oddball? Quite oddball? 800 megahertz version? Anyway, 4 gig samples per second, 12 bit.

and that's none of that boxcar average in rubbish. That is apparently a true 12-bit uh converter in this thing. Whether or not it runs at the full four gig samples per second, I don't know. Anyway, there is a new Hto 1000 series uh also, which as I said, I'll get in a couple of weeks and it starts from like 699 bucks and everyone's pretty excited about that one.

Anyway, this is all touchy feely apparently. uh, soft button power? I don't know what wanker is going on here. Yes, it does have the active probe interface. very nice, rigol specific.

Uh, of course each manufacturer has their own uh standards for that, but of course you know, in this sort of price bracket, uh, scope, you'd expect that. So yeah, it does have a 50 ohm input and one meg uh, 19 puff is it. And we've got dual Usbs on there. and what do we get on the back of this thing? I do believe it comes standard with uh oh, 10 Meg reference output.

That's nice. 10 meg reference in external trigger and auxiliary as well. Uh, Kensington Lock Hdmi output as standard, fantastic Usb device and Lxi Lan as well. The Hdmi output is handy, of course, because you can you know feed it into projectors and capture systems and all sorts of stuff.

Really good. Uh bloody yeah. weird ass. Uh.

mains plug and looks like we're gonna get uh, four to a 350 350 meg probes. So there you go. It's got a little spinny back on it. they feel rather cheap i don't know, I don't know and they are a switchable one to one tender one yeah, 350 megahertz and uh, 35 meg which is actually quite high um for the uh times one position as well.

But that's good because you want a higher bandwidth because this supposedly has a really low noise, ultra low noise front end and a 12-bit converter. so you know one of the things you'd key thing should be buying this bad boy for is um, for like low signal measurement capability. There you go. It would have been calibrated just before it was uh sent to me like the day before or something.

So anyway, you do get a cow sheet and a Usb cable and that's all she wrote. Well I just plugged it in and it's got a permanent standby Led there, the fan were up and I saw the ethernet lights, flash and everything. Anyway, let's see how long it takes to boot. She's taking his time.

Anyway, it is a 10.1 inch, um, thousand, twenty four by eight hundred uh Hd display. Um, supposed to have 1.5 million waveform updates per second. I don't know if I'll test that in this uh video, but up to 500 meg points of memory apparently? Well, we're in. Okay, so that was about 35 seconds or thereabouts.

So yeah, the screen is, uh, really high resolution. I like it. It's not too glary. You know we're going to get some reflection, but no, it's um, it's not super glary at all.

so that is a bonus. So whether or not you actually like the interface or not is, well, you know it's anyway. They haven't got these separate Uh channels for each vertical as separate controls for each vertical. Of course, you can't do that on a scope this big.

but uh yeah, I'm not a fan of the black. I'm not a fan of the look and feel, but who cares, right? You're buying this. Um for the performance and supposedly the ultra low noise. And watch this: 10 5, 2, 1, 500, 200, 100 micro volts per division.

It's already set 20 meg bandwidth. So yeah, because of the uh, 12-bit converter, it actually can offer a hundred micro volt range. so we'll see over what bandwidth that's going to do it. Of course you won't get.

I guarantee you, I get the full 12 bits at 100 micro volts. I really like that that interface looks really jazzy. Look at that. they show the Um like you know the proper system path.

It does have input ground in there you go. so the coupling. we can actually ground that sucker. the 50 ohm termination one meg and they call it our bias.

but that's basically uh, vertical position and then we've got bandwidth. Uh, filter here. What do we got? Oh 20 meg. on? Off and on.

Is that it? Um, they don't have like, you know, 100 meg or something like that. No, it's skew and stuff and then a trigger. Anyway, I I rather like that they're giving it like a systematic, uh view there. And then you can go over to Channel two even though that's not uh, enabled at the moment and you can turn it off and on.

Of course, you don't have to use that interface. You could, just, uh, use the controls. Um, is it got a touch? Is there a touch button off? Uh. touch lock? That'll be it.

Yeah. Touch disable. So if you don't like the touchy feely and and you're a screen poker like I am, Um, yeah. touch screen can be annoying sometimes, other times very valuable.

Anyway, Apparently these rotary encoders uh, they do have detents on them. Apparently these are optical. Uh, these are not electrical wipe contacts some. So that's one of their banner advertising specs.

You might see that in the, uh, tear down, but dump. Yeah, they claim longer life. Now one thing I really not see in here is and that's supposed to light up blue. Yeah, it is.

Maybe my like. So I've got studio lights directly. I turn those off. Um, and then I'll turn my overhead lights off here.

And yeah, once it gets real dark here. in the lab, I can kinda sorta see that that's blue and lit up. but oh geez, it's you know. Oh gee, I can barely barely see that.

Ah, not a fan of that. But you know little things. but you'll notice. One thing this is lacking.

Of course, this is not a mixed signal scope. They're obviously not interested in the mixed signal market. What they are interested in is like the ultra low noise. you know, 12 bit.

That's why you're buying this scope. You're not buying it from mixed signal capabilities, so there appears to be absolutely no option for it. Although of course with four channels, you could do some, um, you know, serial bus decoding and stuff like that. Not sure if it's included or not.

Once again, this is just an unboxing. So what does this little rye gold menu down big rhygo logo look? This is very regal looking. Look at that. look at that doesn't do anything.

it's just a big r. Anyway, I do like the layout here. Of course we're getting the full width of this uh, 10 inch screen so it looks very nice. Oh yeah, that's the auto setup button.

There we go. There's our oh look at that you all look. You can see the detail, you can see the detail on that bad boy and automatically it's popped up with it's popped up with this okay to give us a different time base option right off the bat and then it vanishes. Neat.

Anyway, right off the bat, it's uh, showed up with our statistics here for our period and our frequency. There you go. So at this particular time base, that's how many Um. samples it's a.

you know, waveform updates per second. We're actually getting there all right. So we just go horizontal like this. Fairly responsive position.

Up, down. yeah, Like in that press. Press foot up, press to center. hello, and please forgive.

Like the overexposure of my hand and stuff like this, this whole thing is black. It makes exposure on camera very difficult. Where the hell is my waveform? Oh, I looks like I accidentally, uh, hit Channel One there. Anyway.

Oh okay, the ground's not in the center. that's why it's not going. But it does have push to go center. So yep, no worries.

pop up the keyboard there. There you go. That just allows you to rename the channel there. English and Chinese right off the bat.

So what? uh, capture options do we get here? Acquisition: Normal, average peak, high res, and Ultra Acquire? Um, I did. I think the Ultra Acquire is the 101.5 million waveform updates per second, so that would I'm sure severely limit the memory and stuff like that. Anyway, Memory depth: 10k. What do I? What have I got? Standard Hello.

Oh there it is. 250 meg. Okay, and what happens if we go ground internal ground? Oh like yeah. the the internal ground that? That is not a real measurement.

It's just software grounded that. so that's just meh. Um, okay, but you might turn that on. probably.

Maybe it does actually physically have a relay and short in there. We'll have to have the tear down, but certainly there is no way that I mean I'm at 100 micro volts per division. Okay, there is no way that is sampling right. That is not real.

Just disabled it. Yes, it might be ground in the input. We can't actually do a measurement on that. It just means maybe reducing crosstalk for the other channels or something like that.

Perhaps would be the only advantage to that. Anyway, So I'm going to leave that at Dc coupled one millisecond per division. 250 meg points. Now we want to measure this.

So let's measure. Okay, so volts peak to peak volts, Rms, and uh, Ac Rms as well. I've done a whole video on Ac Rms. anyway.

it does have a lot of measurement. Oh, pre-shoot look at that overshoot. Um, and stuff like that. So yeah, um, they've got lots of options there for measurements.

I like that. Anyway, what we want to look at is noise floor. It claims 18 micro volts, at least one spec. I found 18 micro volts rms.

Ultra low noise. I'm getting 25. so once again, this will depend on memory, depth, time, base, all that sort of stuff. Okay, so can we actually expand those and get stats on any one? Yeah, look at that.

we can. I really like that interface. It just like you don't have to enable it. Looks like you don't have to enable stats.

You just drop it down and you can put it up like. you know. if we didn't care about the frequency and the period anymore, we can just bugger those off if we click on that indicator setting. Reset statistics, Remove all that sort of jazz.

Yeah. Anyway, I'm liking the interface. This is good. Now, for some reason, the count has reached a thousand and it stopped.

reset. Start. There we go. What? It stops at a thousand.

That's a bit disappointing. Okay, I'll just leave it running and see if it actually oh, it. reset them all. It reset this one as well and there's nothing wrong with that.

Of course it's just. it's just the way it works. Ac Rms is around 25 micro volts. not quite down to the 18.

uh, micro volt spec. But getting there? okay. coming up on a thousand? Yep, Yep, it just stopped at a thousand. That's disappointing.

Why? So anyway, when I move, that acquisition totally stops and it's chopped off half my waveform. But there you go. Okay, it's a bit whoa way. I don't know.

It's very. oh yeah, No, it's just. it's just very touchy down to the 100 microvolt range. So what I've done now is actually set the other three inputs to, uh, internal grounding.

So like I've shut them off and it doesn't seem to be any different. The Rms here. If you just do your regular Rms measurement. I've done a video on this as I said, that includes the Dc offset there.

So your Ac Rms is effectively mathematically removing that Ac. So this is one you want to use Ac Rmrs also called standard Deviation as well on some scope. Now does this change with the bandwidth limit? Let's have a look. how do I turn the bandwidth limit off? Maybe I can't at this.

Once I went to 2 millivolts, I thought that might be the case. Yep, Ah, come on. Bloody Touch screen. Ah, it's like there's the delay there.

I've noticed this like a few times and it's kind of like annoying. Maybe I've got to get used to it and learn how to drive it. But yeah, I thought it might do this. When we're at one millivolt per division, we get the uh, we get the ability to turn the bandwidth limit off like that and we can actually repeat the noise measurement like this.

Okay, so we can reset that you can see now physically, it's going to be higher. We're now up to 105 micro volts Rms now. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Anything under one millivolts has its own is exactly the same noise floor on those ranges on the 100, 200, and 500 micro volts.

All right. I found an annoying bug that already made me come a gutter once and give me incorrect uh, noise measurement results. Um, you'll notice I've got 20 megahertz bandwidth limit. Uh, turned on.

I'm 2 millivolts per division. Let's go down to 1 millivolt per division. Okay, so it's on and I'll go down to 500 micro volts per division where it forces the 20 megahertz. uh.

bandwidth. Okay, and watch what happens when I go back to one millivolt. It vanishes, It disables it, and you'll be able to see this on the noise level here. Okay, with the bandwidth limit enabled.

Okay, I go down to 500 microvolts and then I'll go back up to one millivolt and you'll notice that the noise has jumped up because we're a higher bandwidth. That's what you expect. But yeah, yeah, they need to fix that. So this is how I'm going to standardize my noise measurements: One millisecond, uh, time base, one meg point memory here.

and then we're going to get the Ac Rms figure. that's the only one we care about here. and I'm currently at one millivolt per division. So reset the statistics and this is full bandwidth on the one millivolts.

We're talking 55 micro volts Rms noise, Ac Rms noise, And if I turn bandwidth limit on, notice it's much smaller there. 20 megahertz bandwidth limit. uh, 17.3 micro volts. so it certainly meets its 18 micro volt spec on one millivolt.

And if you read the fine print, the manual says the hundred micro volt, The 200 micro volt and the 500 micro volt ranges are just software expansions of the one millivolt range, so it doesn't have a true 500 micro volt range. That's why the noise figure. If I change it down to 500 micro volts, it's exactly the same noise. And this is with a 50 Terminator and a 50 Ohm terminated input.

And of course, if I take off the 50 Ohm terminated input, then yeah, that's what you get jumps up to about for once again, 500 microvolts. uh, 42 micro volts thereabouts. And as far as the bandwidth goes, we're getting about 240 megahertz. So that's uh, you know, slightly above the Uh ticket value here.

Uh, with one volt uh Rms signal and the one millivolt uh bandwidth. Uh, for a three millivolt Rms signal, there you go. three Db down at Uh two, the same 240 megahertz. So yeah, we got the same bandwidth there.

But as I said, if you switch to the 500 micro volt range, even though it's only a software expansion of the one millivolt range, it puts on the 20 megahertz bandwidth so don't know what's doing there. See if you can see this like I move it like this. Okay, and that there were jumps like? I'm not sure. Maybe I can't reproduce it.

Well see it jump back down. What the So go up to here and let's turn on some average in shall we? Yeah, it has some new flex knob thing here. so yep, yep, there we go. 64 averages.

There you go. that'll do the bit well. No, because we're not triggering properly, there's your problem. There we go.

So that's our 100 micro volt signal averaged out because like you know, I don't know the right. I don't know the system, end-to-end noise of this. I haven't even. I can't remember the spec of this.

I'm not going to look it up right. But anyway, we can definitely see a 100 microvolt signal on there. It is actually only 71 microvolts so I don't know what's doing there. Um, maybe we're down at the limits of the accuracy of the Sig Gen or something.

I don't know. Look, this is not a detailed comprehensive thing. it's just a first impressions by the way. it seems to be running uh, Android here.

there you go. Got the Android version for those playing along at home. Other open source acknowledgement, document browser. um thing happening.

Anyway, I do like how you can just call up this and you know you're straight into your uh, networking and your Dns and stuff. Aha it looks like it is software upgradeable. There it is. 200 400 megahertz bandwidth upgrade option? I don't know.

Embedded serial bus trigger and analysis forever. Once again, I don't know if this is standard sort of stuff. Auto serial bus trigger. It's limited.

Rs232 Uart, Forever, Aerospace Bus Trigger Analysis, Flex Ray Audio Serial Bus so I2s sort of stuff and power analysis as well. This would be a nice tool for power analysis. Um, yeah, now I just found something here. I've stopped and captured a waveform and if we actually zoom in on this right because we've got our 12 bit converter, we can go in but watch this right.

50 millivolts per division. It actually lets us go down to 20 and 10 and then it lets us go below 10. It's down to 1 millivolt per division, but you can see it's not actually changing on the screen so you shouldn't actually let somebody go down to that because it then it can give them a think they're at that they're actually on 100 microvolts per division and they're not. So that is like a complete oversight.

They should actually limit that and another quirk that goes along with that because I set up some Y curses here. And just a note between this point and this point, here, we're at 20 millivolts per division. Now it'll actually let us go down to 10, but you'll notice it didn't double in size it actually and this is physically the limit if I'm down to one, right? So it allows us to actually go down to 10 millivolts per division, which where it's no longer relevant. Um, you know it's it's inaccurate there, so it should have stopped at 20 millivolts, but it didn't.

It let us go down one more which then becomes inaccurate and then it goes down completely below that. So I yeah, they need to software limit that. You know? if you're zooming in to measure stuff, you've got to be aware of this. Okay, to show you the 12-bit uh resolution.

What I've got here: a one megahertz sine wave Okay, at five volts, uh, peak-to-peak and we can zoom in. Go to two nanoseconds per division and we can successfully go down to 20 millivolts Uh, per division down here. Now I've done the exact capture the exact same signal on the Rodent Schwartz here, which is a 10 bit converter And so I've done exactly the same thing. and I've zoomed in to 20 millivolts per division.

Uh, two nanoseconds per division up here. So it's exactly the same and you can actually see the quantization of the bits there. There's clearly the difference in there, but you can still make it out right. So this 10 bit scope? incredibly useful, But we are seeing more detail over here on the 12 bit.

but it looks like this is doing sine x on x interpolation. I mean look how smooth this is. So it's doing sine x on x on the displayed data. There's no way it's that smooth just for 12 bits.

So I want to try and turn on dot mode and see what we can get. Just as an aside, like the Roden Schwartz that are shown in my Ac Rms video, they actually show you the uh, the actual formula used for the Ac, Rms and the other functions. Neat. Well, either it's not here or I feel like a complete dummy because I cannot find any way to turn off sine X on x in this thing.

I feel like I'm going nuts. Okay, I'm in Ultra acquire mode here and uh, well, I'm going to have to um Rtfm on the Ultra Acquire mode because all I do is step up the time base and it's obviously like a segmented mode thing. Display mode, adjacent overlay, waterfall perspective. Wow.

Okay, this is impressive. Anyway, Ultra Mode is the only one where you get, uh, the 1.5 million waveform updates per second. So don't buy this scope thinking it's a 1.5 million waveform updates per second. It's only in specific uh, framing.

Ultra Acquire Mode: Normal operation. Uh, no, it's apparently only 55 50, 000 uh, waveforms up updates per second maximum. but that's you know. Still, all right, and uh, just checking the dynamic range.

Does it go off our screen here? So we've got a waveform there? We'll stop that, and then we'll uh, just vernier that and we'll take it back. And there's a little bit a little bit of extra range, but then it clips. so so yeah, that's not much at all. So yeah, there's really nothing doing there.

so if I turn it right down to one millivolt, I run, stop that. And yep, no, that's um, there's no extra, no, no more dynamic range to give there. Okay, so I'm just going to test at what volts per division. The noise actually increases here.

So we've got 17 micro volts now. let's call that 20. at 5 millivolts, it's 29. At 10 millivolts, it's 60 20 millivolts, a 105, 50 millivolts, 240, and 100 millivolts, 520 micro volts, Ac Rms.

We'll leave it at that. We'll just try a 100 modulation test there for our Uh waveform intensity. For the you know, intensity graded display, I don't think it's is it as good? It's not. you know, Nice and bright there, and it's I don't think it's quite as good as previous rivals.

Is it? if they change something? don't know. I mean it's you know. Still, pretty decent intensity-graded display, but I don't know. and can we zoom out after capture stop? I've done a whole video on this and yep, we can.

That's handy. Okay, let's see how useful the 12-bit Uh converter is. So I've just got a digitally generated sine wave as we'll see in a second. so I'm going to stop that and we're going to actually zoom into this.

Okay, we can actually see the individual quantization steps of the Uh digital to analog converter. I'm generating this waveform from a Keysight 3000 not series scope side. I can't remember how many Uh built I think it's is it only an 8-bit waveform generator? Anyway, you can see the individual bits, but inside there, you can actually see the noise inside. You can see quite significant noise detail inside each individual bit, and that's very nice.

Let's compare that on a 10 bit scope. Okay, so we use the Roden Schwarz Rtb 2000, which is a 10 bit hardware converter, so we'll stop that and we'll go in. We'll zoom into the same detail there, so it's exactly the same time base and scale as the Rygole, but there is the Rhigo one. so significantly more detail.

but I can't turn off that sign x on x interpolation that we're actually getting there. So it we're getting essentially more detail in there than what's really there. And on an 8-bit scope, the Keysight R3000 series will stop that Okay to the same one millivolt. And there you go.

You can't see much noise in there. You can see that there's some, but you can't get the sort of detail that you can on a 10 bit scope and then a 12-bit scope there. So once again, bloody Sino-nx I wish I could turn that off. I can't So now I've repeated this exact same test with the 20 megahertz bandwidth limit on.

we had no bandwidth limit before on all three scopes. I want you to note the Uh size of the steps here and the noise relative to that. We'll go over to our 10 bit converter over here once again. 20 megahertz bandwidth.

Of course, the quantization level is the same. we're at the same one millivolt per division, but you'll notice that the noise is significantly more. and you can see the quantization levels like the actual 10-bit quantization inside that noise measurement there, So that's interesting. And on the Keysight 3000, which is an 8-bit scope, one millivolt per division, you can see that the noise is probably oh, you could even say it's slightly less than the Roden Schwarz Rtb 2000.

Now I know the Rodent Schwartz 3000 I think is lower noise than the 2000, but you can see how uh, it's significantly higher noise amplitude level in there compared to the Uh Rygol. I mean, you can just look. Check it out, right? It's much cleaner and that's exact same bandwidth, exact same 50 ohm terminated signal and everything else, but that 12-bit converter and the lower noise floor. It's doing a good job there.

Oh, and by the way, the fan on this thing, um, is kind of like a little bit annoyingly loud and whiny. If it's just your only instrument here on the bench and you got it on, you can really notice aside, replacing the fan in that with a quieter one. Anyway, I think that's it for just the initial unboxing and first impression of this thing. And it's obviously competing against the Siglin Sds 2000 Hd series, which is also a 12-bit scope.

but the Rygo is significantly less priced. It starts at 26.99 for 200 megahertz four channels, whereas the Cigalent the 2104 Hd starts at 30 to 80 uh, us dollars for four channels, but only a hundred megahertz. If you want that 12-bit four-channel low-noise system, then the Rigol is coming at a cheaper price point. but as I said, doesn't have much optional uh, logic analyzer that doesn't have a waveform gen whereas the Ciglet actually has both of those as optional.

And I think you know some nerds on the forum are arguing about whether or not you know the signaling is slightly lower noise than the Ryegol, etcetera, etcetera. But the Rygole does have a better upper limit. The Siglin only goes up to 350 megahertz model, this one goes 400 megahertz or even 800.. so the 10 will be interesting.

They do, um, have a new Um Asic? uh, front end. Apparently I believe that's the same Asic front end on the 1000, the cheaper 1000 series which is going to start at 699 bucks. so that's kind of exciting. Um, but unfortunately, I think they're going to software it and not have less than one millivolt mode.

So yeah. anyway. and also, the signal has a 1024x600 screen and the Rigol here is uh, 800. So you're getting a better vertical resolution screen for less money now.

Rigo only claim, um, greater than 8 bits effective number of bits on this thing. They don't claim any better than that. So you know the specifications. You know, the like, really detailed heavy specs for this thing.

Or they're not exactly like screaming them like all your big manufacturers will go into much more detailed uh specs and stuff like that. But Rigel obviously are competing against the new Zigland 12-bit jobby, and they're trying to undercut them on price and bandwidth while leaving out a few optional features. So yeah, I really want to know why the 20 megahertz bandwidth limit automatically cuts in on less than one millivolt. It's obviously the same range.

It's physically the same range. Why it software limits it to that? I don't know. They might be doing, um, some uh, software, you know, eres in enhancement or something like that. Um, at the less than one millivolt, the 100 micro volt to 500 microvolt ranges there.

so they could be doing a bit of software trickery there. But uh, yeah. more tests required. But I wish I could turn Exon X off.

I can't find it. and Raigo haven't gotten back to me yet, so I don't know. Anyway, the market is really hotting up. Siglit and Rygol are like battling it out.

Um, in these 12-bit scopes. Obviously there's other brand 12-bit scopes on the market, but you know they're like the two are competing. sort of. Uh, you know, players at the same level.

So it's going to be interesting to see. And I'm interested to see what The 1000 series brings as well. Brings the technology of the new Centaur chipset and also the Uh, presumably the Asic front end as well. and just a quick test of the tap test on the input.

Yeah, look at that microphonics. Almost every scope does it anyway. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please give it a big thumbs up.

As always, discuss down below and the Ev blog forum. All the nerds, all the test equipment nerds are over there. I'm talking about this stuff, so join on in. Catch you next time.

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