Dave caught up with Richard Popple from Rohde & Schwarz to talk about the new Hameg oscilloscopes, the Hameg acquisition, and the Rohde & Schwarz Scope of the Art oscilloscopes.
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 I'm the Ren Schwarz stand and I got Richard here and Richard's going to tell us about some cool stuff he's got. What do we got? This looks like a sexy little Hmeg so this is basically yeah. Hmeg now is a R Schwarz company.
The beauty of it is we bought them. We now make them in the Ren Schz factories. So Ren Schs quality which is really excellent. Um, new range actually launched it was launched next week right? officially in Australia Um Family starts with the 70 Meg 2 Channel up to 200 Meg 4 channel.
Uh, which is and that's the 100 Meg variant. Um, really cool. MSO ready? Yep, Um, basically if you want the mixed signal option, you buy the logic probe. Yep, if you don't want the mixed signal option, you don't buy the logic probe.
All right. Couple little ringles there a component tester built in for those guys who wanted yes one is working. no it's not which is really handy and you know basic 100 2 G sample 2 MB memory which is probably better than industry stand and it's cheap and it's neat and sexy. small I Like it.
It's one of the smallest ons in the market. let's take a closeup look at that. and uh, these really nice small compact unit. It's uh, in terms of width, it's uh, it's really quite small.
leaves a lot space on the bench. actually. y I like it. So you said these made in the Uh made in the Rhoden Schwarz factories now where the he is not made in Germany anymore.
it's actually made in the Czech Republic Czech Republic now made in the Road Shorts Factory in Bper in Czech Republic right? So still Euu? Yep, Um, but you know we use that factory for our military radios. We use it for some of our transmitters. So high reliability? Yep. But the technology level is a little bit lower than, say some of the real-time analyzer stuff that we do in the Raden Schs factory in Mem for example.
So um, yeah, but Roaden SWS Quality system Roaden SWS Factory Nice. That's what you want right? I Like it. and how much is this uh retailing in? Australia For off the top of my head, it's um, well under 2 Grand behind of that development EMC right? The EMC pre compliance sort of Market pretty much and r is very strong in the EMC Market we go all the way up to fully compliant military standard systems. If you want to test a Euro Fighter yep, we'll give you the chamber and the amps and the whole lot.
Excellent. Okay, you got to start somewhere right? Absolutely. Um, other bits and pieces. So this is the top of the H scope front.
Uh 350 Meg 4 channel and as you can see 4 G samples per second, 2 Meg of uh of memory and again the MSR options are already here. Yep, 16 channels digital and again, it's just two of the probes. It's the only thing you need so there's no price uptick to get a mix signal. Oscilloscope got it.
You just buy the probes right? Trick with these is this is the lowest noise oscilloscope in its class. Buy an order of magnitude order of magnitude order of and it's a big claim. I'm quite happy to prove quite happy to prove it. Um, one of the interesting things with these is that we go down to 1 mol per division like most Scopes in that range do. The interesting thing about this one is that at 1 Mt for division, it's not a zoom right? Some of our competitors, it's a true yeah yeah. they put five mag and it's not bandwidth limited either. It's right. Oh, it's full bandwidth.
It's 500 MHz 1 molt per division. Okay, I'm impressed. The only one that does it that way I was going say depending on which one of the competitors, they either do one or the other. Yes, they do, so we don't Yep, okay, um.
Excent. So very very low noise front end. Um and and basically it needs to be because we designed it that way, right? Um, brilliant. That wouldn't come cheap.
I'm assuming um I think they start about 7, go to about 11 or 12 something like that. they're not. So it's it's a mid-range It's I mean 500 Mega Scopes They're They're a commodity product. There's a market price for them.
They're all about the same price. Hous is about the same price, right? And that's really. that's the point. They're a commodity scope so, but it's a really nice one.
So why why the acquisition of Haeg? What's the story? It's actually a funny little. it's a funny little story. Mr Hartman As I Understand the founder of Hmeg was an employee of Ren Schwarz early on in the piece, right? and when he retired he was 9ish. No one in his family wanted to continue the business so he rang the old family connection and said, would you like to buy my business Ah, nice and at the same sort time.
Roden Schwarz Was looking at a lower cost possibilities to broaden their Market footprint reach more of the market and it was. It's a natural fit. Um, obviously there's some changes in the way Hmeg is engineered. M It's now engineered y by Rod Schwarz if you like, but there will always be a price separation, right? So there's a level below which it'll be Hming and above which it'll be Ren Schz is there are still products manufactured in the Homade factor? No, the homade Factory's actually been closed down.
The H development group is still uh, mous and where it's always been right. So that group hasn't been closed down, but production was moved as I said. but they have more production. but basically you know it enabled us to get Hmeg into a higher quality production environment with actually no additional cost.
We didn't have to build a new fact, got there was some paying right? Well, I make production, but it was worth it. Yeah, absolutely you know. Um, the the warranty rate and the debt own arrival rate. Hmeg is the same as Ro Schs y it's less than half of a% Nice get on arrival.
This is the top end of our oscilloscope range as we speak. Um 2 GHz 10 G samples per second. Um, headline number is a million waveforms. a second acquisition, right? right? Um, the really tricky point is though, that even if we're doing a mass test that drops only to 700,000 right? Because there's a lot of Hardware Pro it's Hardware processed sofware. essentially Hardware process. it's pretty much all Hardware So the realtime controller Assd, which is some 30 million gauges worth of radw specific silicon is handling three DVDs a second weather data to do that sort of processing, right? Nice. So there's a lot of data crunching that goes on in the background and you know there's a lot of things in the MMI that were sort of kind of built to make life easy, right? So we've got a a 2 MHz signal with FM and AM on it. As you can see, we've got our Fft going on in the back end.
We've got a couple other channels you can see on the right hand side are little thumbnails right? So if you had a control line that you wanted to monitor in the back, you can just see the thumbnail. But if you actually want to say well, you know what? I want to have a look at it, you get dragg that's a nice user interface I Got to admit, yeah and then then you've got the the channel setup is still in the thumbnail and you can see the signal and you you say I want that one? Well actually no I want it there. You just put it wherever you want. Okay, but if you don't want it anymore, you just take it away.
Yep, right and you can do the same with the math functions. You can do the same with any of the channels and when the mix signal option comes out Y which is a plugin that goes in the back, right? it's in the back so again, you don't have to buy a mixed signal the scope. You can buy this one and upgrade it as you need. That'll be in the in the F Same user interface right and again very very low noise.
Front end right. The front end of this is actually designed to run 18 GHz even on the 2 gig system. so again, very very low noise. Very high effective number of bits.
Yep. Do very very fast. Sweet. And what OS does that run? Do you know it is running Vist embedded V seven embedded Window seven embedded right Windows 7 embedded And so some of the other things about the MMI that are a little bit no I don't want that one.
Sorry I want this one And how long does it take the boot? Big question: 3 to 5 minutes. 3 to 5 minutes. Yeah okay, not as quick as you might want, but at the end of the day to do this sort of display processing, to have the data interfaces, the printer drivers, and only ask other ins and outs that you need in a modern instrument, you either have to write it yourself, you have to use Linux which is what we do in the generators, or you end up with the smallest possible version of Windows You can run Y and that's what that is. and so some other little tricks right? The Vertical Channel Setup The vertical Channel menu gives you a picture of the vertical Channel That's how Works You've got your probe setup. It's brilliant. You've got you go across to your channel setup, you've got your coupling, your vertical scaling offsets and then you go into the acquisition menu. That's how an osilloscope works and you can see exactly what it's doing and you know we can run multiple waveforms, views of the same data and that one might be Peak Detect that one could be let's say that one's sample but we actually want to look at the envelope of that sample. EX and so we can see multiple D See, see the same data in multiple views and you get a better feeling for what the way form is actually doing.
nice I Like it so you know that's the horizontal Channel That's the vertical channel. The horizontal channel does basically the same thing the trigger Channel. You know you've got all all of the fun, that finger error, all the fundamental trigger types M Basically everything that you want. The other important thing to note about this machine doesn't have an analog trigger system.
It has a digital trigger system. Got it? So trigger Jitter is a function only clock. Jitter Okay, the other thing is there's no rearm time, right? We don't have an analog trigger Circle and we just don't have to worry about trigger Jitter cuz we're not trying to line up an analog trigger system with a digital acquisition system. Excellent! So we can do a lot of things in triggering that very hard to do an analy right cuz we're basically looking at all that data in real time with all this uh, information available on the screen.
Can you plug in a larger screen and get real estate? or is it D There is a DV right? but it's basically a mirror. It's a mirror right? and you know I have never seen an instrument, neither have I I Think it' be brilliant. We actually have a long-standing request and We had a discussion with the Mm Engineers about it for this. The issue is it's so touchscreen driven that if you split the discre of course, how do you drive it as a touchcreen? Yep.
and you kind of lose a large chunk of the MMI functionality unless you've got a 25 in touchcreen. Yep, got it. And then you, you know, added $4,000 to the price of the instrument. Yeah! Fair Cool, All right, Thank you very much Richard My pleasure.
looks like a mew teardown tuesdays toy for dave
If I was a billionaire…. 😛
Damn I'm in love with the Rohde and Schwarz oscilloscope.
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3-5 minutes boot time! damn, windows7, why would you put it on embedded… I know people use it, but.. microsoft isn't the most reliable company in the world
holly crap! I have never see that kind of scopes in my life! Beauty!
@Gameboygenius Yes it is and the guy in the video used this statistic as a selling point for the product, this illustrates the company's reactive (rather than proactive) dedication to quality. Now consider how many must fail within the first year if 0.5% are DOA due to shipping shaking out the manufacturing defects. Stressing the units with in-house vibration/temperature chambers would reduce these numbers.
Less 0.5% DOA? That means up to 1 out of 200 units are dead on arrival. That sounds like a lot.
We use a few Rhode & Schwarz UHF DTV transmitters at our country rebroadcasting station. 20Kw solid state water cooled. The power amps automatically drop each unit if it fails and has redundant everything (excluding the console). We've never had a catastrophic failure that didn't have an outside cause.
Compare that to the "Old Twins" (vaccuum tube, constant phasing issues) and what we call "The Antichrist" (FM radio, even the xmitter designers went "WTF" on that one…).
R&S, great machines!
Thanks Dave,very interesting as always for amateur TV broadcast.D-ATV
@yanava Wow, sounds like they really need to up their game!
Not to mention their brazillian arm has the worst customer service ever to offer their services in the land. They don't answer emails, they don't take any criticism, they're not open to our opinions. Tek and Agilent are way, I mean WAY better in this regard. The scope is pretty good, but the company lives in another age.
I'm fucking pissed at RTO, they're ONE YEAR late with the RTO's MSO function. Our company bought that option in 2010 as a "secret", NDA and all that. They promised to delive by the begining of this year. They didn't and we lost an important debugging feature through a project. I had to bring my TEK MSO2000 to work. As a reward they gave us more warranty. FUCK WHO WANTS MORE WARRANTY? If I had to make the choice today, I'd go for the Tektronix MDO.
@hjohnson7801 Nope, the third dislike is from Rigol.
@thewii552 LOL!
2 dislikes are from Tektronix and Agilent