Hi yes, it's vintage Oscilloscope time. CU I Love oscilloscopes and in particular I Love this one. the 54 62d Agilant. well it was Huet Packar back in the day before they uh, changed their name to Agant.

Now they changed it in Bloody Key site Technologies are ridiculous. Anyway, this is like a Um early 2000's vintage I believe it came out in 2000 originally for the 546 00 series. Now there is an earlier one to this which is the 54645 D and they are significantly different looking. This one is more modern looking with the round style buttons and the rubber buttons.

The other one, the 645d very similar Uh scope in terms of low layout, architecture and specs and everything with the mix signal option, but it had the old style Square HP buttons. this is before they you know, revamped the interface and went like this and I love this scope I Use this extensively at companies I worked at back in the Um early 2000s and I'd always specify it in it was a nice compact Uh scope like this and really it was pretty much state-ofthe-art for its time and it basically still holds up today. I mean yeah, it's a 100 MHz bandwidth. This series actually went up to 500 MHz and it is, uh, only 200 Meg samples per second.

but uh, that could dou based on a single Channel it was four Meg points of memory I think optional, eight Meg points which was absolutely huge back in its day to get a mixed signal scope with that sort of deep memory. and also, and that's 4 Meg per Channel as well you could actually inter leave that and get eight Meg on a single Channel It was absolutely phenomenal back in this day and it used the Uh Meaz Zoom uh technology I believe it was the believe it was Meaz Zoom 2 at the time and you're probably familiar with the modern Agilant Uh 300, 2000 3000x series Scopes They use the Meaz Zoom 4 technology. this is the older Megaz Zoom technology and this was marketed to the hilt back in the day and it was extremely popular scope and still holds up today. I Um I Don't know anyone who does not like who's used this and does not like this scope.

It is just absolutely brilliant. It's got Sinx onx interpolation so you could easily get 50 MHz uh bandwidth out of that 32 intensity uh gray scale screen. Yes it is only a green screen but it was true mix signal so you'd have the 16 channel logic analyzer as well. Fantastic! You could configure all that you could trigger it.

It had I squ C triggering in here. Here it is where is it more? I squ C triggering it could do SPI and TV and pulse width triggering and patent triggering and all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff was pretty much stay in the art and I Loved the interface for this. It was so easy. Dedicated vertical controls horizontal that just worked as you'd expect.

Simple uh acquire menus had real time mode or there it is. There's uh, most of the time you operated the thing in real time, but maybe right up at the high end you might, uh, do the equivalent time sampling stuff like that. Of course it had full, uh, average in. um, what else have we got here? We've got.

uh, and it had vectors or dot mode. Now the huge marketing claim for this thing was that it was 25 million vectors per second. Yes, not waveform updates per second, as you're more familiar with these days in marketing terms, but vectors per second? Whatever the hell that meant I Don't think anyone really knew back then what it actually meant it. display vectors there it is, and it would basically uh, those vectors joining the dots so to speak.

The sinx onx interpolation. It could do 25 milli million of those per second. but I Don't think Agilant ever sort of said or explained how that translates into real world waveform updated and Deadtime and all that sort of stuff. but oh man, it sounded impressive.

Oh, 25 million vectors per second. Nobody else marketed their Scopes like that. It was just fantastic. Oh anyway, I Love this scope and it's brilliant and it's still quite usable today.

So I Highly recommend if you can pick one up cheaply, Put it on your eBay watch list and try and get one of these puppies. They are really good woven. Electronics I Love it! There you go: August 2000 um I actually have the full 16 channel logic uh Pros with this with all the clips and everything. Fantastic! I Got one of the original manuals I think and this one is in very good working condition and even though it was grayscale, one of the beautiful things about this is that the resolution of the screen which is still not matched by most Scopes Today, even you pay $1 $20,000 for a scope you don't get, Get the resolution that's on this one.

It's got 1,000 horizontal pixel resolution on its CRT Absolutely phenomenal. 1,000 pixels. most of them don't do that. had exactly uh, 255 vertical pixels for the uh waveform so that you didn't uh, you know it wasn't sort of uh, interpreting anything or adding pixels or anything like that.

So beautiful. Crisp, clear display when you zoomed out and you get all that 4 or8 Mega detail in there. Fantastic screen on this thing. It really was fan was always a little bit noisy in it which was a bit annoying.

Uh, you could save all your stuff to a 3 and 1/2 in floppy disc of course. and uh, we'll check out the waveform intensity mode. and yes, as I said, 32 uh, gray scale or green scale levels in there. so we'll actually compare it with a modern scope and see if it's any good.

But I Just love the way this thing operates. it was no fuss, well laid out, very simple, basic, nothing to get in the way and it just worked well. It was a beautiful scope to use on a day-to-day basis. And yes, this thing had an Easter egg as well.

to get to it a bit convoluted. Press: uh, save recall, go into save press new file and then I Love the entry mechanism on this. It just worked so smooth and so intuitively. Anyway, we go in there and we just go R O C K see how quickly I'm entering that rock on dude, rock on dude creating bit Maps Woohoo here we go.

Fantastic Look at this. welcome to Rocks Channel One Rob Knob rotates the ship. fire fire fires a missile, thrust moves the ship. Fantastic asteroids type game.

Beautiful. Boom I'm dead. Just look at the resolution they're able to get on this screen. It really is phenomenal, topnotch and you got to wonder why they were still using a CRT like this back in.

Well, you know, 2000 when they were when they designed and first sold this thing. Well, it was that horizontal resolution. You just couldn't get the LCD to give you that thousand Point horizontal resolution that this thing has even as I said. You know, even today, you're struggling to find a scope that's got better than you know that 800x 600 type screen in it? This one's got 1,000 points.

Awesome! And the other thing is it boots up pretty quick for a digital scope. Check it out here. The floppy drive go but bang. it's basically straight in.

It took more time for the CRT to uh warm up than it did for the scope to boot. And of course that flicker on the screen you can see is not uh actually the screen happening there. That's just the uh shot speed of my camera in this case 25 frames per second. but I can increase that and it'll go away.

Oops sorry I meant decrease cuz if I increase it I'm now at a shutter speed of 1250th of a second and look at that shocking and at my maximum shutter speed of 2,000 of a second. look what we get. But of course the screen is just fine. There's nothing wrong with it visually, but on the camera, that's the effect you get.

And here we have the old and the new side by side. Look at that and well, this is you know, 14 15 years ago, uh, vintage and the new 3000x series here. And the good thing about this of course is that it has a trigger output so we can measure the waveform update speed based on the trigger speed. So I'm feeding in a 1 mahz signal here from the function gen and there it is on the screen and we can read off the output frequency.

Now of course this was advertised as 25 million vectors per second which sounds fantastic. So what does that actually give us in terms of Uh update speed? Well, not much by modern standards. Look at this 520 Htz. that's bugger all and uh, actually if I change the that's at 5 nond per division.

so that's the fastest time base I increase it and it doesn't drop down until uh oh, it's dropped down a fraction there. There we go 10 micros and it's starting to to uh starting to jump around there. But there we go. going down until we get to there and we got to adjust it and we're down to.

you know, that's at 500 microc per division, we're down to like 120 odd Hertz And of course, with our deep memory, which was a big feature in the day, 1 milliseconds per division. we can stop our sample in there and we can zoom right in on that. no problems whatsoever. Beautiful! That was a killer feature back in the day.

Now here's an interesting aspect. We've got the trigger output here and you can see we've got our trigger Jitter in there. There's actually a fair amount of that, presumably because it's got, uh, you know, it's got to do some interrupts and stuff like that. Um, it's not, you know, like a fixed pulse output.

So presumably that is the processing time that this scope takes to process the waveform after it actually uh captures it and you can see if I change the time base like all the way up to maximum 5 NS per division As I said before, I have to go right down to what is it? 500 microc per division before we see that uh, pulse width change and it was 1 micros before Now it's 585. so if we jump back there, it is 1 microsc and you can actually see a bit of variability in this. If we, uh, let's have a look CH moves some of the controls look see how it slows down. If I move the horizontal time base like that, you can see that it's got to process that and you can see the slower updating rate of that screen.

So the the waveforms per second is slower updating so that we're seeing well effectively. less Jitter on there because it's not updating nearly as fast. So you'll see that if we go in here. here's our update.

Well, let's let let's go right in here like this, shall we? Let's go in right in there like that and you can see that if we change that boom, that control causes the horizontal, uh, the the update rate. sorry to drastically slow down. There we go and you can also see a difference. We're in real time mode at the moment and we're getting that uh, pulse width there, the positive pulse width about 1.4 micros or thereabouts.

But if we switch real time mode off here Bingo look at that, it's extended all the way out to 1 micros and then that changes with each time time base setting. When we're in equivalent sampling mode and you can see that's equivalent sampling and not actually real time updating there. And just like the modern Agilant Scopes No, this one doesn't slow down when you do measurements like I. Add the measurements on there and you can see there's no difference in the waveform update speed at all.

Well, it's I don't know where the 500 and something Hertz has gone. It's now 367. so I'm not sure what I've I've changed since then, but it makes uh, makes no difference. We're getting 500 HZ before won't we? Anyway, I can turn on cursors and I can move the cursors around and look.

it's not changing. any of that user interaction on the screen is not changing any of that update rate at all. So it's only when you do like the horizontal stuff which is what, which is operating on the memory like you know, actually the display uh, part of the acquisition system that it changes. But anything to do with the curses or measurements or anything like that or other menus and operating the vertical time base and all that sort of vertical time base.

duh, um, vertical attenuator? Then you know it, it doesn't do anything at all. You can go into utility menus and play around and all that sort of stuff. Acquire menu. You can even turn averaging on for example doesn't affect the update rate at all.

There it is still 361 Hertz or 361 wave performance per second. So it's like this is like on par with like a Ry Ds1052e in terms of waveform updates per second these days. But back then you know, oh that marketing slogan 25 million wave for uh vectors per second? Ah, that was a killer. And you can even do stuff like uh, pulsewidth triggering for example and doesn't slow it down in the slightest.

So it was, you know, I Never had any issues actually using this thing. It was just so fast in operation, all the controls super responsive and it just worked. It was a brilliant scope still is. and how does the intensity graded display as I said 32 uh, green or gray scale levels compared to the modern 3000? Series Well, they both look pretty shitty at 100% I've got my Uh 1 mahz carrier frequency with the 1 khz Am 100% uh Am modulation here, but they're at 100% intensity so if we wind that down, we start getting our true analog like display there.

Here we go: Oh no intensity controls over here. Look at that I reckon it's I reckon it's Superior I' like the old style one better. It really, it really resembles an analog scope better than the 3000x series. Does I mean check it out.

that's just you know that's like minimum now I'm down at 0% and look, you see the real, the higher intensity in the center there and it's just a beautiful display. if you forget about the flicker cuz this flicker doesn't happen in real life. We got some trigger Jitter there. by the way, it's not easy to trigger on.

uh, this type of signal. but yeah, that is just that is brilliant. I Like it. Very analog like display.

I Reckon better than the 3000x series and we can of course freeze that and uh, zoom in to our heart's content. Look at that. There we go. We can see our 1 MHz carrier in there.

and yeah, that is. That's just beautiful. Beautiful. Absolutely thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Look at that. Now let's see if we can see some run pulses. I've got some run pulses set up on this, uh, serial signal here and they should be in there somewhere. and if we change the intensity, this is on the 3000x.

you can start to see them in there. You see that? And of course if we take our time base out, you can start seeing them in there. and of course you can, uh, stop that and C Oh, there we go. We caught one There we we go.

so there. just occasionally there's these run pulses in there like there's a bus conflict or something like that. That's what it's uh, simulating. Let's see what we get on the Ancient 54 62d.

Okay, we have 100% intensity, turn that intensity down and yep, I can see I can see the Run Yeah, there we go. I should have had the exact same time base to make it fair, but you can start seeing the run puls is in there. No problem at all. Look at that, it's all showing up.

Yeah, not a problem, look bam. And so really that is. That works quite well. Just like, even though it hasn't got that super fast updating 1 million waveform updates per second although I'm not sure at that time base.

it's not 1 million on the Uh 3000x series, but you can certainly still see those pulses in there. No problems whatsoever. I Like it. It's just as useful a troubleshooting tool as the 3000x is, and let's try that on a modern, well modern 5-year-old Ryol 1052 E.

And well, you can occasionally pick them up there. but the wave for no, the waveform updates in is much faster on the 546 W2d, that's for sure. You can just sort of see the Run pulses in there. and because this hasn't got an intensity graded display, it's not going to help you any in ter terms of turning that intensity down.

I don't know, but that that's in the center so that's that's got nothing to do with it? No, in fact, that's just the is that just the graticule? No. I I don't know. But anyway, not nearly as good as the 10y older 54 62d. No contest.

And it also has a fairly, uh, comprehensive set of internal self tests as well and build-in uh signals. There you go. It's generating various things and switching them internally. You can probably hear the relay clicking, boom boom boom.

There we go and passed. It's very quick too. I Like it, and it does have build-in math functions. not a huge amount, but you know it does uh, integrals.

and it does ffts and you know everything's just fine. So about the only major thing it's lacking that you might get in a modern scope, say is segmented memory. uh, for example. and well, yeah.

Like there's other things. like there's no pushable buttons for example, like centering the horizontal back. That would be nice. things like that.

You know, just small things. but eh, as far as a you know, a modern, functional uh scope goes, this one can pretty much hold its own against uh, most Scopes these days. of course. The big feature back then of course was the mixed signal stuff.

And you can do Ffts at the same time. So I've got Ffts, two uh, digitals. uh sorry, uh. 16 digital channels plus the two analog.

Uh, well, there we go. the two analog channels as well. or superimposed. Shame, it's not color in this respect, but uh, you know it's It's pretty good.

You can, uh, change the size of the waveforms. Of course, you can make them tiny like that, medium or big. You can actually set the threshold voltages to a user defined level, so you know it's got a Oh full level cap Who full level capability. There we go I got a man.

so many different Scopes so many ways to use them and you can set the userdefined voltage pretty. You know, so it's pretty usable. Uh, mix signal scope and it's got I believe Uh, 400 Meg samples uh per second on the digital Uh channels and one Meg per channel for the digitals I believe. Don't quote me on that though.

And as far as your internal I Squ C triggering, for example, goes well. you can set the Uh, the clock line, the the analog channels, or any of the digital channels same with the data line and then you can trigger off start, stop conditions and frames and you know it's it's all there. But I know what you're saying Dave I Want to see inside it? all right? Here we go. Let's take this sucker apart, by the way, I didn't uh, show you the back.

It's got a nice uh carry handle as well And there we go. We got hey old school parallel port Rs232. There's an option interface for external modules. There's a trigger out and external trigger input.

Nothing fancy As I said, the fan was a bit loud and just two screws on the back and we're in. You caught it in like Flynn Look at that. There we go. Fairly neat and comp on the inside.

I Mean, look at that. There's you know, plenty of space still left in there, of course. But as you'd expect, the main board is on the bottom, which we should be able to have a look at today. There it is.

We have a good look at that and uh, pretty standard. uh, you know, neck board and the CRT and all that sort of stuff. So nothing fancy going on there at all. and it is very neat and tidy and built very well.

I like I Not particularly keen on the big ribbon cable just going from the Uh Mains board over here. by the looks of it. um, that's obviously carrying. uh, that's carrying all the power out of it.

So that's the that's the power ribbon cable going down to the main motherboard on the bottom like that. Not too spectacular how they've uh, routed that. Arrangement and the front panel board. Look at that.

They've just got the ribbon cable going from the front panel there, so that's a bit untiy but uh, as you can see, nice big plunk in power switch there going all the way. uh, lever arm going all the way through to a real clunk and power switch at the back n this standby power rubbish and uh, it's very neat and well designed. There's the neck board on the back there that's fairly nice, held in place by celastic there on the inside. and the CRT is certainly well braced inside.

Uh, this metal shazzy here. So I really like that? That's really quite well mounted and tough and rugged. Oh beautiful cuz this sort of was a portable scope as far as you know. Scopes went.

This was designed to be a lightweight sort of portable scope you could take anywhere that looks like a nicely uh designed and nicely uh laid out power supply board. In fact, it looks like it may have even been done by Agilant. I'm not. uh, not entirely sure.

it doesn't look like a usual shopped out job, but it is very well spaced. uh hu the main cap in here. Nipon Chemicon. No problems.

The other ones over there are Rubicons, so top quality caps as expect. and uh, that's very neatly designed, well spaced out. it's not. you know, one of those compact designs that have, uh, thermal issues these days.

And of course, the fan is freestanding over here. easy to replace the fan if you want to put a silent one in there. And there's the front panel board. And one of the really good things about this scope is the quality feel of the knobs and and the ver or the the encoders on there.

and these encoders. I'm not sure what brand they are, have no idea but they just f Still fantastic. A nice big, you know, solid, uh heavyweight sort of fi to them as you turn them. they actually require a fair bit of force.

They just feel like they're going to last forever and probably one of the best uh incoda knob feels I've ever encountered on a scope or any bit of gear. Just very nice I Love that. Sort of nice. It's hard to convey you have to sort of play with it yourself, of course, but they just feel beautiful to spin.

They really do. And there's the money shot. Let's take a look inside. at specific chips.

you can see the big two Meaz Zoom branded uh As6 over here. Not just one, but looks like it's dual. uh chipset? Maybe one per Chanel or something like that? Who knows. but uh, yeah.

that is neatly laid out and um, easy access to the floppy drive here. Uh, if you want to modernize this, you could just replace it with uh, one of those ones you can buy on eBay that, uh, duplicate the floppy interface. but they actually have a USB key on the front and you can just stick a USB key instead and it should be fully compatible. And there you have it.

there's the main Meaz Zoom technology. No, they aren't two identical chips. They're actually two separate chips here. This is the MSO Mega So this one, uh, they're using for the digital channels? almost? uh, certainly.

And this one they're using for the analog channels. And yes, they do have H slightly different part numbers on them. There you go. There's a closer shot of the two chips for those playing along home.

HP Branded Upd 67 823 S1 go figure. Is it a HP ASC or is it uh, just some rebranded, uh, regular? uh, you know, processor wouldn't be an arm of course, but some other you know, 32-bit processor or something? just rebadged? Most likely. Well, Googling that one all I get for the Upd 67 823 is that it's an NEC part Now renesis of course. Uh, and that it's an Asic Hm.

H Bingo There it is. NEC Gatoray 44 Micron Technology 3.3 volt big Ass 672 pin BGA Ultra high performance sub Micron gate Target of applications C high speed, low power disspation blah blah blah reasonable price, blah blah blah. It's got. uh.

here we go. well. I'll link in the data sheet anyway. 11 base arrays with raw gates from 33k to 382k Gates Puzzle Cell architecture oo mixed transistor sizes Lovely.

I Like it and um, it's got PCI interface blocks. Fantastic. Uh, Plls. There you go.

So very Fpga like. And there it is. the Upd 67 823 so 56,800 available Gates Usable Gates Only 39,000 and 200 Ioads uses three metal layers in the technology. There you go.

Interesting. So what are they doing inside that thing? Is it something to do with the you know, triggering in system? perhaps? Or something like that. Maybe interface controls for the Meaz Zoom A6 Because it may be like the wave, a waveform update processing on the screen or something like that. although that's the Meaz zoom.

But yeah, it's interesting that it's located between the analog channels down here, so this is the front end. Here's the analog inputs: the digital inputs located between physically located between them and the Meaz Zoom As6, so that's rather interesting. Looks like we might have another processor over here, so that's the one that probably controls the screen and stuff like that. We got our flash memory over here and things like that, so it's not sort of the main uh, you know, applications processor.

uh, controlling this thing I Think that's probably going to be over here. so it's something to do with the Meaz Zoom acquisition and or trigger in or something like that. If anyone knows, please let us know and all of that's running from a main 200 MHz clock oscillator. They're not mucking around there and there you go for you.

Motorola 68 th000 fans. There's the main application processor 68 Co2o classic and there's the ROMs tucked under there. and there's what I'll call the analog Meaz Zoom Aset cuz it's dedicated to the analog channels. And then we've got our two sample memories here separate ones per Channel and likewise for our digital Meaz Zoom Asic Once again, as as I mentioned before, separate memory for the digital channels, which is great.

It doesn't share the analog channels and there's quite a few memory chips surrounding that dedicated to 4 16 channels and I popped off the metal can on the front end and Tada There it is. Looks like we got some Lucent chips here. Let's take a Clos look at those that's effectively one complete Channel basically there duplicated above it. for the other channel.

there's another sort of Reay up under there which is under the plastic which I can't uh, really show you at the moment without disassembling the whole thing. There's not much there, trust me. I might be able to get the Uh shot in there cuz it's actually fairly dodgy how the Bncs are done in there. so I'll show you those in a second.

We've got ourselves a Lucent uh, probably I don't know. Custom part I don't know, we'll have to Google that but I don't anticipate much luck there. but that's all we've got on the analog front panel. Uh, front end? Not much of course.

but hey, it's not huge. this is only 100 MHz BWI front end. you know Kitty stuff there it is VB 85 Good Year Back to the Future Awesome. But no, nothing search doesn't turn up anything on that.

So yeah, some sort of cust analog part. So there's the BNC on the front panel. That's probably the best shot I could get. It's securely mounted onto the front panel.

No problems at all of course. but then they just running bear wire over to the main board there and that other wire there isn't I don't think that's ground I think that's the ID for the Times 10 probe. So there you go. That's about all she wrote for the Agilant 546 D2D Mix signal MSO Scope Fantastic scope for its day.

Incredibly popular. sold incredibly well. Everyone wanted one of the these puppies and still are. Quite a usable scope today, so well worth putting.

There's a whole bunch of Partners as I said the newer model like this with the rounder button. these older style with the squarer button. slightly lower spec but still very usable. Mixed signal scope today if you can, pick one up at a decent price, so well worth putting on your eBay watch list, that's for sure.

So anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Look at this 145 year- old scope and if you liked it, please give it a big thumbs up of course. and if you want to discuss it, Eev Blog Forum is the place to do it that is links down below and as always there will be highres tear down photos on Eev Blog.com that's LinkedIn down below as well. Catch you next time.