Hi welcome to the Eev blog and Electronics Engineering Video blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics design. I'm your host Dave Jones Hi Pretty exciting one. Today we got another Eev blog. World exclusive.

We've got the brand new Tectronics Mixed Domain Oscilloscope. You heard that right. Mixed domain. Let's check it out And here it is: the brand new Tectronics Mdo 4000 Series Oscilloscope.

We'll take a good look at at it up close later. so I won't wave it around now, but it's basically a new series of Scopes In fact, a whole new technology. A whole new paradigm. Be prepared for the market in buzzwords with this one whole new paradigm of oscilloscope.

So Tectronics claim Now, basically, uh, there are three types of oscilloscopes. Now before, there are only two. Uh, your traditional time domain oscilloscope. Your regular digital storage oscilloscope DSO Whatever you want to call it.

Okay, that only did time Domain then Along Came the uh. mixed signal. uh, digital storage oscilloscopes. And they combined your time domain analog and your digital logic analyzer.

And now Tectronics have claimed they've created a whole new category. a whole new paradigm of mixed domain oscilloscopes. What this me means is that you get three things in the one scope. you get your traditional time domain um, analog stuff, you get your uh, mixed signal digital and the third with this scope, you get RF or um uh Spectrum frequency spectrum capability.

hence the name mixed Domain Mdo series Scopes Because you not only combine frequency domain with time domain, but the digital domain as well. Awesome! And thanks to Tectronics we've got one here on the review date. It's being released today August 30th. so presumably you'll be able to buy it from today, uh, onwards.

and we've got one to review and tear down on the release date. Awesome! First up: I've got to say what this is. Ccope isn't because it's very important. there will be a lot of confusion.

First up, cuz I know everybody will ask it is not Tectronics answer to Agilant X series oscilloscopes. It's got nothing to do with it. This uh oscilloscope is the Mdo 4000 series. It's Uh to complement their existing D Um DPO 4000 series and MSO 4000 series.

So you've got your standard DPO Series 4,000 Tectronics scope which is just your uh. analog oscilloscope. Your analog/digital oscilloscope. Uh, the MSO is the mixed signal one with the digital and this one, the mixed domain not only has the analog, it has the digital as well.

and it's got the new RF capability built in. and that brings us to point number two. What it is not, it is not simply a Um Fft function. It is not the Spectrum analyzer capability of this is actually a true RF Spectrum analyzer.

It's got a true Spectrum analyzer RF front end in it as we'll see. and it is not just an Fft capability. And the third thing that it's not is just a spectrum analyzer bolted onto it that's kind of separate. It's actually more than that.

Much more than that. it's completely integrated into the uh time domain of the oscilloscope and the triggering system. as we'll see: I won't go into it now, but you'll see how valuable it is compared to a regular just having a separate Spectrum analyzer on your bench and an MSO Now I Think this new Mdo capability is a big deal. It's a a huge deal and a big step forward in the industry.

And let let me try and explain why here. I'm going to have a shot at it. Okay, this is your regular oscilloscope. Okay, your your DSO your digital storage time domain oscilloscope and it displays your waveforms of voltage versus time as you're used to.

And we've got frequency displays down here like you'll see on any Spectrum analyzer. you've got uh signal level versus uh frequency span down here. so that's your frequency domain. but up here on your time domain a regular DSO will display your analog waveforms and then along time your mix signal oscilloscopes and you're used to that.

It displays your digital signals as well. they're exactly the same, but they're in the time domain. Okay, their amplitude or digital uh level. In the case of the MSO one or zero versus time.

now the new Mdo, the mixed domain adds Uh frequency capability to that. Now it's as I said before, it is different to just an Fft of this: DSO Because all digital, almost all digital storage oscilloscopes on the market have an Fft capability. You can display your frequency domain, so what's different? Well, there's a huge difference and it's quite subtle. Now, the Uh DSO When you do an Fft on that on a regular oscilloscope, your Rle, or your agilant, or your tectronics.

Whatever. Every oscilloscope up until now with software Fft capability. What it does is it captures the entire Um Uh waveform. Basically, it captures.

You know it might even be off the screen like this depending on the memory depth of the scope it captures that processes. it, does a fast Fuor transform Fft on it and displays your frequency domain. Okay, this Mdl scope displays the exact same frequency domain. But what it does.

And here's the crucial difference is that it captures a true RF frequency spectrum of it at each time. Point Like that in time with the Um at each uh, not quite each sample cuz there's going to be like a you know, there's going to be like a window in there, so it's so. they're actually wider than that, but it doesn't need to. It doesn't operate.

It doesn't calculate the Fft based on the entire digital domain. It captures the whole RF Spectrum at each one of those points. So what that allows you to do is when you've uh, say, when you're doing a single shot acquisition, you've uh, triggered on some condition or some fault or something like that, and you've got your data captured in memory. Not only do you have your analog, your digital, but you've also got all the all this frequency capture as well at each one of those time points.

So when you scroll through your uh, your time domain signal, when you scroll through in the time domain, the RF Spectrum window changes because you've captured each one of those spectrums. And the other crucial and key point is that this it actually has a separate RF input, a proper RF Spectrum analyzer input. It's got analog inputs, digital inputs, and RF inputs. So it's this spectrum down here has nothing to do at all with your analog signals that you're actually capturing.

It truly does do three different domains: analog, digital, and frequency. and that's just awesome. And that is the huge difference with this. with the mixed domain oscilloscope technology and how it's I I think it's completely gamechanging.

For those who need this sort of capability, it just cannot be beat. So who's going to use this sort of capability? Well, anyone who's designing RF systems because especially uh, software controlled RF Uh systems, you know Bluetooth Zigby WiFi whatever these days. GSM mobile phones? anything? Okay you? uh, what it allows you to do is actually capture. Um, it allows you to correlate and this is the key thing.

Correlate, Uh, your. What happens in your digital and your uh, analog time domain? What your software is doing. You could have, um, you could be tracking what your software is doing down here in the digital um space as well as checking your power supply at the same time. and you could be checking your RS Spectrum so you may go through okay say that this is a digital Command right here to switch on your Um to switch on your RF transmitter.

Then you will see no signal down here like this. You'll see nothing and then Bang at the soon as that comes on bang you will see your signal turn on your RF uh uh Power output turn on like that and then uh you can watch as say you could watch. say the Spike Let's say turning off, turning on your RF actually caused you know a spike or something like that on your power supply. That's not a good power supply but let's say the it was mon you monitoring the power supply and you can actually you might see the dip like that as your RF transmitter turns on and you might see that accidentally cause say a glitch in one of your digital lines.

Something like that. Fantastic. And that's sort of correlation between your frequency domain and your time domain is something that you can't get by just doing an Fft of your DSO because it's done after the fact. It's got to capture all this data.

Then it's got a software process and it takes a whole heap of time and then displays your spectrum and by the time you've done that, boom, you've missed it. It's useless. And because it's not a separate RF input so you're not actually uh detecting I mean you could use the second channel of your you know one channel of your DSO to measure your power supply uh, for example and the other channel and uh to measure your RF input and actually get an Fft spectrum of that. But it's just it's it's just not the same.

When you've got an RF input true RF input that's capable of you know, several gigahertz, then well, you've got a complete Spectrum analyzer built in. It's awesome and it's totally different to having a separate Spectrum analyzer on your bench as well because you might have that Spectrum analyzer. but they're separate instruments you know might be able to cross Trigger or something like that perhaps. But it's not really the same as having it built in to the same scope When you can correlate your individual uh, your, you can correlate your RS Spectrum to individual time points in the time domain.

Why didn't somebody think of this before? Unbelievable. And here it is. Now the one we've got for review here is the uh top of the line. It's the Mdo 4 41046 all the 6 GHz um RF uh Spectrum input.

Now they add the dash uh 6. it comes in a -3 a 3 GHz version or a 6 GHz version and it's 1 GHz analog uh bandwidth at 5 gig samples per second. And it also comes in a 500 megaherz uh version as well. So there's basically uh, four different types, and you'll notice its appearance is virtually identical to the m Uh to the MSO 4000 series.

That's because it's based on exactly the same model. Basically, they've just added the RF uh capability into it. It's um, I am told it is exactly the same uh uh capabilities the MSO 4000 series. So if you ignore the RF um stuff which we're going to talk about today, this will effectively be also a review of the MSO 4000 series as well.

And as you can see, it's practically an identical Uh layout. except that, um, the external trigger down here. There's no external trigger on this one. It's probably the first oscilloscope in I don't know, 30 years not to have an external trigger.

So if you want your four analog channels well, and external trigger for your analog, well, you got to give up one of your channels. Bummer. it's not even on the back. Unbelievable.

Anyway, Um, that the external trigger has been replaced with the RF input. It's got the R Uh, the Spectrum analyzer controls here, and it's got a numeric entry uh, keypad jammed into here. That's a real, tiny keypad. The trigger things been moved from down here up to here in the horizontal, so it's all quite a cramped layout actually.

But we'll take a look at that later. So yes, just like any good Spectrum analyzer, it's got an N connector uh input for the RF. It is not just an Fft function and that can't be stressed enough. It is a true Spectrum analyzer and you pay quite a few th000 difference.

but you are getting a true um Spectrum analyzer module in there. and uh, of course it's got uh, some basic controls you'd expect on any uh spect analyzer. you know it allows you to well turn switch on the RF Channel just like you can switch on any of the analog or the digital channels and then you can set the frequency span, amplitude, bandwidth, and markers and other stuff. and a numeric uh entry uh keypad up here which is Tiny that allows you to actually enter direct Uh, frequencies and other numerical values as well.

So um, pretty much it does have all the basic controls of a spectrum analyzer now, although they shouldn't be direct ly compared just for a size. uh comparison. I've put it next to the agilant X Series oscilloscope here and as you can see, it's a fair bit uh, taller and a fair bit wider as well and it's a fair bit heavier. It weighs around 5 kilos which is you know, a little bit more than the agilant.

And one of the things you first notice is the gorgeous huge XGA display. it's uh, 10.4 in there it is W compared to 8 and2 on the Agilant 3000 Series not that as I said, you should compare them. And the Uh depth is. If you take a look here, the depth is pretty much identical.

and on the side here there's a 4 mm earthing uh banana socket as well so you can plug your uh ESD uh wrist strap into there or uh, anything else you wanted. And of course we've got our another um Shazzy Earth here and we've got our probe test output hooks here I Rather like like those and as is common with the other Tectronics series, Scopes You get two little uh plug-in modules behind this door. here. they're just little uh prom modules which actually en enable uh, various software functions which you can pay through the nose for I Don't particularly like this way of doing it I Like the Agilant software Keys better.

cuz um, you know if this is in the lab and somebody, uh, somebody can come along and steal one of your little Uh modules Bingo Capabil gone I don't like it and you guessed it, made in China And look, they're totally proud of all the Uh patents on this thing. go figure. And on the back here we've got there's actually four uh tapped threaded screws in there, so obviously something's designed to plug into there. That's one of those uh, security lock cable things you can plug a you know, an anchor cable so people don't steal it in labs and stuff like that.

but I'm not sure what those things for. And there's this recessed uh, cutout here. So obviously there's some sort of module which is designed to go on the back there. I'm not sure what.

And as for the connectors on the back, we've got an auxiliary output here. We got a 10 MHz uh reference in. So if you've got a 10 MHz uh, you know a very accurate 10 MHz reference in your lab as a lot of good Labs do then uh, you can plug it in there. It's got a Uh VGA video output, which we'll try.

It's got a Um 1 Gbit, uh Lan ethernet interface. This is all standard. by the way. you don't have to pay extra for this.

It's got USB device and two extra USB hosts along with the I Mains connector. Beauty And let's talk about the interface, shall we? Well, the first thing that strikes me is, isn't it damn well cramped and complicated I mean all this stuff has been pushed. All this RS stuff has been pushed in to the exact SI same size case as the uh regular MSO 4,000 series. And one of the first things that uh, strikes me is this, uh, huge, uh control up here.

It reminds me it brings back, you know, memories of the oldfashioned, um, massive, uh, horizontal time bases on the analog Scopes And it's beautiful I Love it. That's actually like a force feedback kind of. You know? it's not actually a, um, an optical. Well, it, it is an optical encoder.

But it's not actually a knob. This one here is a knob and you immediately think just by the size of it and the Dual layered nature of it. that is the horizontal time base. But it's not.

Here's your little horizontal time base. Look at this pissy little knob here. Oh, it's horrible. The first thing I did when I turned on I always reach for that is the horizontal time base and like goof it up.

It's not. it's the big wave inspector ooh, which is actually a great uh capability. But look at how much space this wave inspector is is everything. I You know I can just see them sitting in a meeting going.

oh you know, we really need to. It's all about inspecting the waveform and we need to make that big and prominent and everything. Let's do that, shall we? And everyone agrees and nods and Grunts and so there it is. It takes up all your front panel there.

two big multi-purpose knobs here. No one having one is not good enough. They got to confuse you with two as we'll get into later. but that's it.

That's the horizontal, That's the entire horizontal thing. You've got your acquire uh menu which brings up your uh soft buttons as well, but that's it. one you know. boring as I don't like it trigger once again, very simple.

Uh, your vertical is, um, pretty standard I Like it. You know there's no problems with it at all. Um, you've got your four channels and they are colorcoded I Don't particularly like that the buttons are the same. that the buttons are actually the color as what.

they actually light up too. So that's actually a yellow button. It lights up yellow I Much prefer just to have it clear and light up yellow. It doesn't actually have to be a blue button and a pink button and a green button.

and they're probably not as bright as they could be either. Um, you know that pink one there is, prob, you know. I That's hard for me in the reasonably bright Labs here. Lights I've got in the lab here.

it's really. you know it's it's a bit difficult to actually see that that's turned on, so I don't particularly like that at all. Same with the run the Run Stoppers they're all a bit dim. They're not super bright or almost too bright like the Agilant ones, but you know it's just a minor thing.

Another thing I'm going to have a rant on: We don't have a button here. Look, it's just it's missing. but I can kind of understand cuz they have other stuff like the clock and other features there as well I Guess eh? whatever. But what's going on with these vertical soft buttons? They're not centered, they're offset.

I I Hate lack of symmetry like that I Don't like it. Why? Why is that? Why aren't they actually in the center of the display? I Don't get it. Now, while the optical uh encoders there, they've got a nice, uh, indent on them. These soft ones don't.

They're just an optical encoder. But but the horizontal and the verticals actually have uh, indents and they feel pretty good. but uh, they're the only knob on this entire thing which is actually uh, pushable is the Uh level which sets the trigger level to 50% and it takes a while too look at. The Hourglass Come up there clunk clunk.

The scope's pretty slow for a lot of stuff as we'll uh go into later. But yeah, why can't the um the you know, Why can't these be pushable and you can set the fine adjustment? I Don't get it. I Mean check out how easy that function is. That very simple basic function of you fine vertical scale is on the agilant scope here.

Look, you push it and it goes. You're in fine mode and you can adjust it. There it is. 46 M it.

There we go. Nice, easy to adjust, you push it again and you're back. Bingo But if you want to do that same thing on the tectronic scope, it's a chore. Let's try it.

Go into the vertical menu here. We have to go into more and then we got to choose the F. Thankfully it's the first option. If it wasn't, then look at this annoying function right? A This little box here pops up right? Let's let's take a look at this little here.

box here pops up and you think that okay, Is it? is it related to that button? No, of course it's not. It's an adjustable function, but it's next to this control which is the B control. but it's got a little A there. You've actually got to use the A control up here to then adjust the fine scale and and it.

There's a lot of lag on that too. I Don't like it. It really doesn't. Uh, update very well at all.

But why doesn't that appear up here next to that button? The user interface on this thing is just terrible. and here's another annoying thing. When you're actually done, you think that you would push this select button right there it is. Oh yeah.

Select. That's what. I You know that's what I want. Get rid of it.

No, the menus don't automatically, uh, disappear on you. It's really annoying. You've actually got to go menu off to get rid of it. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have a soft power button here.

It is I Actually Kind of like the design of this. It's really nice. It's recessed and angled in there so it's really hard to accidentally hit. But unless if you, maybe if you had something on your bench like you had a, you know, a screwdriver or something like that and you went oh bang oops oh maybe I Don't know, but that's a bit too much.

but look, it stays on Why: This is the only bit of gear in my lab which has an A you know, an LED that is for standby power. it. Give me a break. Let's switch the lab lights off here and uh, boom, it's blaring.

It's absolutely blaring away. This is terrible. God This ain't some consumer toy And how much does it draw and stand? boy? Good question 4.8 Watts God Flight A Jupiter on 4.8 Wats You got to be kidding me and that's a power factor of - 0.2 20 Almost. Uh, 24 V He crazy And how long does a stupid thing take to boot up? Well, you don't really want to know.

but here you go. Oh for goodness sake, boot, come on. Oh, this is painful. That only took a minute and a half.

What am I complaining about? Yeah, right. You can run the bloody M in a minute and a half. Give me a break and when it's switched on, it uses 143 Wats and that is Uh, 151 VA At95 Power Factor: There you go. And if you switch on the RF um, it doesn't really, um, increase that at all.

And how loud is it compared to the Agilant scope? So we got the tectronics here. the agilant here. Let's give it a go. I Think the agilant is much quieter I Won't bother with a um, an actual Um SPL measurement.

But here's the agilant and let's give the tech a go. No, you can hear the bearing noise in the fan. it it is definitely louder. and it's that's rather disturbing in a quiet lab.

It is actually quite loud I Don't particularly like it. One of the things I really like on it is the Uh tiltin B/ carry handle. It's a full width one and it locks into three positions like this: You don't have to do any uh around on the side like that. it just uh locks into a position like that so you could actually have your scope if you didn't if you Ed like a right angle.

uh Mains plug down there. you could actually have it. um, sort of slightly elevated like that. or you could actually tilt it all the way back down like that it locks into position down there like that and and that will stop the scope falling backwards if you accidentally knock it.

Now, the manual does actually recommend if you're going to use it extended with the feet. uh, like this, you must have the tilting bail down like that and it lines up uh, perfectly. between the uh tilting Bale the rubber foot and the front um tilt stand like that. So that's a lovely bit of uh, lovely bit of, design I think and if you did operate it up on the feet like that with the tilting bail up, then, well, yeah.

I Could see how this thing could certainly tip over relatively easy. You wouldn't have to knock that much for your scope to fall over on your bench. Oops. Now there is one thing to note with this one problem.

I mean compared to the uh, small little carry handle on the agilant there which just sort of folds away uh, nicely and gets out of the way if you um, fold this back of course like this, it does actually take up room on the actually behind the scope on the bench and that could be, uh, rather annoying, but it doesn't actually, uh, touch the bench down here so you can still have you know items scattered all over your bench like that and it would go under them. but yeah, I guess it's uh, you know. pros and cons both ways. It's a nice tiling Bale but it could get in the way as you know, Doubt gathered.

I'm not particularly thrilled with the uh design of this thing and the looks I mean check out this sort of cream color they've used over here on the RF uh panel I Don't know, it's just it just seems a bit. not cheap, but just you know, not as well refined as say the new Um Agilant 3000. Series It's just pretty bland looking I think I don't know, but it's big and the thing is, it does take up a lot of space on your bench. I mean you know, check out.

You know that's there's my bench and that scope takes up an awful lot of that bench. Let me tell you. and the if you compare, you know, if you're trying I wouldn't actually be able to fit it up there in my rack actually, it's uh, it's actually too high for my rack. So what do you do I don't know I Guess you? that's the penalty you pay for this.

uh, huge .4 in display? really? I mean I guess they've done their best to try and make it uh, small in, you know, as small as they can with such a massive display cuz all the controls are really quite, uh, cramped in there. and just like other tectronic Scopes There are two Uh module ports here for the various software options. This is the uh limit module. They gave me a whole bunch of them and they just slide in here like this.

They're just little uh proms with um, you know, a serial code in them and they just enable the firmware which is the firmware is already built in. These things just enable it. uh, basically. and I don't like this concept at all I much prefer the uh software license key used on the agilant Scopes Why? Because people can steal these things.

These are bloody expensive. These can cost thousands of dollars each and people can just steal them. And you can only put two in there at once. so you got to store the other two somewhere else so you can be racing around.

Oh, where's my USB triggering module? Oh I can't find it. It's hopeless I Don't like it. And if you thought the Agilant software modules were expensive at like $500 well come to Tectronics folks. Look at this: $1,380 for the Um uh embedded triggering module, 1530 bucks for the USB triggering module, and oh oh.

bargain down here for the limit testing only $845 but this is only some of them. There are like 12 different Uh options apparently. and uh. one.

the auto uh version. for auto car triggering Canon Lin there's one with a flexray module. It's $4,790 and if you want to do something real basic like trigger on an RS 232 signal or an RS 485 signal, pretty basic stuff. you want to analyze it.

1,380 bucks. You got to be kidding me. Come on. Half the fun of getting a new scope like this is opening the box.

Let's check out what we get inside. All right, What do we got? We've got a first up. We got a front cover Beauty it just slips on the front like that. Sweet.

Love it all right. What else do we get? We get a real manual, a real paper dead treat manual, and it's all in English the whole thing and it does actually really look good. Beauty You get a carry bag I Like it looks pretty good. or at least I got one anyway.

If uh IID ask for one. If you're paying this sort of money, make sure you get your carry bag for it. We got an accessory Pro pouch I Have no idea how this works. It's got like plastic straps on the back.

where does it strap on? how does it strap on? I don't know. Beats me? eh? Whatever. All right. Um, we've got some logic probe accessory sets with all the little uh, various, um, uh, probe Hooks and ground points and stuff like that.

Beauty. Okay, we've got a Uh N to BNC connector because it's got an N connector on there for the RF and um, most people will Pro Well, a good majority of people will want to use Um BNC So beautiful. Okay, we've got some uh probe things. We've got the Uh CD with software the product documentation as well.

Whoopy Do! got a power cord? It's one of these funny Yankee ones doesn't even work here. Uh, and we've got our logic probes which we'll take a look at. They look really good. that's 16 channels worth.

Please read this. Please update your firmware because the firmware in the Box probably's got bugs in it. So what else we got? We get uh four Pros cuz this is only available in a 4 channel uh version. So these are the Uh TPP 1000 probes.

These are the 1 gig ones. So Beauty nice probes and uh, you get the uh application module installation. What? You just plug it in, don't you? I don't know what do you need that for and how to use the logic probes. Uh, and we've got looks like a cow certificate Beauty and well, is that it? Yeah, that's a bit.

Oh I forgot. Make sure if you're paying 20 to 30 grand for this sucker, make sure you ask for one of these demo boards I don't know if it comes with it I Specifically ask for it it cuz I Needed to test this thing, but for this sort of money, you'd want the bloody demo board. Let me tell you, it's got a whole bunch of useful uh signals that you can learn. Um, how to use the scope and what features it's got Beauty Highly recommend you get one if they don't include it.

They damn well should. Don't get too excited about the cow certificate. It does actually have the sticker up there. you can peel it off and put it on your scope, but it doesn't have any test results or anything like that so some companies May or might not find that valid.

These are the probes you get with the TPP 1,000 It's a 1 GHz passive time 10 passive probe a pretty low 3.9 Paa farads input and uh I don't like this case at all. It's it's plastic, it's light, it feels really cheap and nasty. but um I do like how it interfaces with the scope. Check this out.

It's shaped to fit exactly for the input, uh of the scope and it's got the uh probe um, sense thing there and you just push it in like that, there's no screwing to be done and you can't pull that out. So I I really like that? Um, even though it's all plasticky, but uh, to get it back out, you just have to push your thumb down on that and pull it out. So I think that's uh, really quite a nice concept. I like it and you get one spare probe tip with each one and that actually, uh, screws into the top here.

Of course you get the Uh Grabber and if you take that off, you can unscrew that and there you go. That screws in so you can if you, uh, bust your probe hook which happens, uh, your probe tip which happens, uh, you know, can actually happen. Uh, you can actually replace it. So I like that.

You also get with each probe you get four ground, um, low inductance ground attachments and that's great because you're always losing those damn things. So I I Like the probe itself, it's uh, small. It feels good. Um, but yeah.

I don't like the plasticky case, eh, whatever. Now, not only do you get the standard easy hook like that for the probe, but you also get a little mini. Grabber Fantastic! As for the logic analyzer probes, I Don't mind them at all. They seem very high quality.

They're all individually numbered and colorcoded for the 16 channels in two separate Uh pods. and I like the concept of the clip-in um, uh, like actual module over here? I'm a bit disappointed that it doesn't use a standard1 in Uh header on there, but uh, whatever. You know you've got to buy the custom probes anyway. really.

and it locks in place like that. and to pull it out, you go like that. I like it. It's rather nice, but um, it does have like a wax.

It's almost like a conformal or wax coating or something over the Uh leads. I'm not sure what that. I'm not sure if that's a coding or that's part of the Uh P they're using a special type of uh PVC or some sort of material there, but it just feels a bit feels a bit weird. One nice feature is that you can have a central ground point from the Uh input module like this and they actually Supply you with the Um Spade to Uh1 in um, kind of you know, pin header thing so that you can do a one Central ground over there and not have to use uh one of your flying leads.

Now here's a bit of a fail. We've got the demo board here which I really like. It's got a ton of uh, test signals on it and RF and does the whole works. It's beautiful and it comes with this nice uh split USB cable which has power only so you can power the board you.

there's no DC jack on it. You got to power it from the USB but if we plug it into our USB host over here, fail, It doesn't boot up. You can probably see that little lead flashing over there and the one flashing up there. it's like it's resetting.

Okay, and it doesn't matter if I use the Um ones on the back or the one USB hosts on the front or on the back, it doesn't work at all. yet. if I plug it into the USB on my Adelin up here, no problems at all. It works exactly as uh it does when I plug it into a notebook or into a 5V uh USB uh W wart adapter.

There we go, it's not resetting and it's switched on and it can go through the various modes. Huh? What's up with the USB host on here? They obviously can't provide enough current I Don't like it? Let's try a demo shower. We'll try the multiple uh Peaks one first. So you press this mode button here and it switches down to multiple Peaks there.

and if we go into our scope over here if we hit uh the utility menu and then it pops up and we can actually choose uh demo down here. so we've got to go over once again. this silly a thing. it tells you to use the multifunction a button.

So if we go down and select demo down there and once again, you don't actually select a menu item, it just automatically uh pops up. But there you go. Here's all the Uh demos built in. Unfortunately, unlike the Agilant, there's no built-in test signals.

you got to use the demo board to do it. But anyway, multiple Peaks and that um gives you all the info you need to how to plug it in and how to do it. Really quite nice and then you just go recall and it sets up the scope and Bingo on. Once again it, it just stays on the screen.

It's okay I guess cuz you might want to read the instructions still I just find that rather annoying. Anyway, Bingo There we have it. the multiple Peaks demo and we can play around with that I Like it. Now it's put us into fullcreen.

RF Spectrum Analyzer mode and that's where these buttons down here come into play. You: uh, hit the RF button over here and uh you. It comes up with the various menu options for the RF and this is where we can start playing around with the various options here. Now the first thing you'll notice are these Auto markers up here.

it's automatically detected the highest reference point. it's centered that in the center. In this case, it's 2.4 GHz At-8 Dbm and then it's automatically detected the other um, the other Peaks and it's put markers in there. That's a fantastic capability.

most um, you know, usual. Spectrum Analyz, You got to dick around with the markers. You got to move them across and spend ages just trying to Mark and figure out what the exact Uh Peaks are. but this detects it automatically.

It's brilliant. I Like it. and uh, you can set that to an absolute Uh value or to a relative value as well. And if we press uh Spectrum traces down here we've got the menu that uh, we can turn on, say averaging.

check it out and the white waveform. there is the averaging. We can turn off the normal one if we want and if we just have the Uh average there. if you want to, uh, increase the averages.

Once again, you got to use the a button up here not the B button. Don't get confused and you can have there we go. We got 512 averages and you can see that the that these these peaks in here really come out like if you don't have that average in switch on you can kind of. you can get that peak in there.

but this peak here sort of just vanishes. but when you switch on average in Binga really comes out of the noise there it is I like it and you can do the exact same thing with maximum values as well. so it finds the maximum one so you can turn off the average and that's just the maximum. Peaks and you can do the same for the minimum as well.

Once again, the minimum is gone off the screen there. but uh, there you go and you can switch them all on at once if you want. So you can have the average and the whole lot. I Like it.

It's a really nice Spectrum analyzer. Another one of the Annoying user interface quirks that they just haven't put much thought into. look if I call up Spectrum traces here up Pops the Spectrum traces menu and okay, they're align with the buttons great. You might think I'd be a to turn normal off but I can't I because like this one is highlighted down here I've got to go up there, press it once it highlights it and then I'm allowed to toggle it.

What? What's the deal with that? It knows that's the menu item. Why can't when I press that button, it should just do it. It should just toggle It shouldn't have to highlight first. It's ridiculous and down here it's got various detection uh, methods for finding the Peaks and uh, you can in.

At this time it's fully auto mode which you know lot of the time you'll want to use that, but you can put it into manual mode and you can. For the normal, you can actually detect uh, the positive Peaks the negative Peaks the averages the samples. It's really nice. It's got uh, quite a lot of flexibility.

and if you hit the more button down here then you can do our RF signal path compensation that compensates for temperature drift and stuff like that It takes 3 minutes to do I've tried it, It does. do it. It tells you the last time you did it was uh, 6 hours ago and I really like that you can actually uh, get uh, better accuracy and compensate um for various environments when you move the instrument to another Lab at another temperature for example, or outside into the field. And if you go down here to probe setup, you can choose voltage or current probes and the attenuation settings and it's a reasonably decent uh Spectrum analyzer.

In terms of dynamic range too, it's quoted as having uh, a dynamic range of- 60 DBC which is pretty good. So if you see the Uh Peak here at you know, - 18 Dbm, it allows us to get down, uh, reasonably low. It's um, very usable actually. and if we hit the markers button here, then uh, we can.

It gives us a bunch of uh menu options here and as I mentioned before, you can, uh, the markers up the top. um, you can go into a Delta mode and there there it is. It's a Delta frequency there of uh, look at that, the uh, the center frequency is 2.4 gig and then it's 1.92 MHz uh to the next Peak Atus uh 10 DBC beautiful And you can set up the automated uh Peak markers you can turn them off and on and and the threshholds, the various thresholds that it uses to actually detect those particular markers. It's very flexible and very usable.

I Love it and you can see that if we, uh, adjust the Excursion threshold here, it will eventually these other markers will switch on so it's only detected that one and then it will detect the other two and then it will detect the others up to it. Looks like you've only got a Max maximum of five markers though. and of course it's got your traditional manual markers so there you go. You can adjust those, pull them across, and automatically detects the it shows you the peak value there and you can use the other control to move it across if you want to get say that one down there you could.

No problems at all. and as you can expect if you hit the bandwidth uh button on the right over there you got various options. You can choose various uh window, um uh cap abilities uh caser is the default but you can do the you know rectangular Hamming all The Usual Suspects and you can change the span as well. And there you go.

It's only 20 to1, 100 to1 and it gets better and better as you go up. And if you choose the amplitude button over on the uh right hand side, then you get the various amplitude controls and that's uh, pretty much it. There we go. just hit auto level and it's just done everything for me and set it up.

so that's pretty much uh, the full H There's probably you know quite a few more hidden features in there, but they're the main Uh functions at least of your uh, frequency control down there and it. and it pretty much works as you'd expect a regular Spectrum analyzer. It's quite nice with his automated market so a markers. So I think they've really got a win here with the Spectrum analyzer.

But there's one other huge step forward with the Spectrum analyzer capability in this thing and that is what's called the capture bandwidth and that's how much RF Spectrum it can capture in one go. In the case of uh, this new Um Mdo, uh, scope, it has a capture bandwidth of one gig 1 GHz It is absolutely massive. Most other Spectrum analyzers on the market have a capture bandwidth of you know, 10, 20, or maybe even 100 MHz order of magnitude, uh, lower kind of stuff. And if if this, DS if this Mdo had a capture bandwidth that small, then it would have to uh sweep across.

What they do is they actually sweep across the whole Spectrum actually Gathering the data and then you wouldn't be able to get these quick. uh, entire Spectrum captures and updates. Uh to actually enable this Mdo technology like we talked about here. so it can just go snapshot, snapshot, snapshot, snapshot.

It doesn't have to uh sweep across the entire range that takes time at, which means that you wouldn't uh, be able to capture the RF spectrums this quickly. So just from uh, that aspect alone, this is worth getting as a spectrum analyzer. It's brilliant. and um, especially with the large Spectrum jumps and and the large differences in Uh frequency Uh spectrums in in today's modern RF uh RF technology, then capture bandwidth of a Gahz is pretty much Essential these days I Think And here's a beautiful feature.

Let's try the spectrogram. We can go into the Uh demo if we go into the utility down here. Hello, there we go. Let's go into the demo and spectrogram demo.

and let's set up that because it's probably there we go. It's set it up a bit better and beautiful and you can see the spectrogram buildt up here. It's absolutely beautiful. Now, what this spectrogram represents is it basically takes this spectrum Okay, and it flips it like that.

It flips at 90 like that. So what you're seeing Now if you look at the Um: if you see these peaks in here, it correlates. You see how that Peak there is drawing that intensity There it's it's got that sinusoidal sweep on it. So what is this useful for here you ask? Well, as you can see, it's useful for very slowly varying RS signals.

This is varying in real time here as so it's very slow, but it's it's good for seen drift and things like that. So what does this spectrogram actually represent? Well it uh, in this case the X-axis represents Um frequency. Because we're we're using a you know, a spectr metalizer. We're in the frequency domain so as you can see, it's sweeping back and forth and this is the actual frequency.

So that's the X-axis The Y axis of course represents time. You can see it's slowly moving each. you know a few times per per second it's moving up so that is actually time. This is the latest time down the bottom and that's the previous time up there.

and the Uh color actually represents the amplitude. So the higher the amplitude, the uh, darker the color you're actually going to get. Well, it's in. Well it turns out white is a higher amplitude than the Uh blue background, the blue background color there.

So that's a spectrogram. Really useful for looking at RF drift and slowly varying RF signals. Now I'm going to show you what this 1 GHz super wide capture bandwidth can actually do where it's actually useful now. Um, what I'm I'm doing here is I'm capturing an RF signal.

Okay, so I've I've captured it. It's in stop mode so I could disconnect the inputs and we've got a um we've got a RF Spectrum down here which shows a carrier frequency at 900 MHz So RF transmitter is putting out 900 MHz at the moment. Up the top, we've got our time domain display um and these these are both captured at the same time. Okay, and uh, this pulse here.

This trigger pulse actually uh switches the frequency of the carrier from 9 mahz to 2 1/2 GHz And as you can see, there's no 22 GHz signal there at the moment because this yellow bar here represents the time period within which um, that uh, frequency spectrum was captured and it was all captured at once. Now, um, what we can do here is we can, um, pan across. Okay, we can use our pan control here to move our window across and as you can see as we move it, it's captured a frequency spectrum each time and you see our carrier frequency at 900 MHz Boop it's starting to drop. There it goes because we're at the period where our um our trigger pulse has has actually uh, switched off that frequency and if we keep moving it over at the moment, Oh, here we go.

We're starting to see another carrier switch on. There it is. Bingo! 2.5 56 GHz There's our other carrier after the time period. So as you can see, it's captured all of that within that tiny time period.

Like one microsc per division. There, it's absolutely tiny and that's what you get with a super wide capture bandwidth. It's awesome. I Love it.

And if that wasn't good enough, let's take a look at an even more powerful example that shows just how brilliant this thing is. What I've done here. Okay, what I've got is I've got a uh, um, a Vco. A voltage controlled oscillator.

Okay, and uh, it's designed to operate at 2.4 gig. Okay, now it's Um. what we've got here is we've got uh, digital signals. We've got an SPI bus here.

Okay, there's a little SPI packet. We've got the Vco enable uh pin here. we've got the phase lock loop, uh voltage, the PLL voltage, and what we're doing basically is we're turning on the Uh Vco here. Okay, a voltage controlled oscillator.

We switching it on and uh, and we can watch our PL voltage ramp up just as we could. on a regular uh DSO we can on a regular mixed signal oscilloscope. We can even look at the Um SPI packet data. We could zoom in on that and actually see the data packet if we wanted.

But what we get here is because we've also got the Um. We've also got the frequency domain as well, captured at exactly the same time. We can actually look at the frequency as uh, we can actually yeah, the fre of the Vco as the Pl voltage changes and see where our Vco, how long it takes for it to become stable. This is so brilliant, brilliant, and so powerful.

Let's have a look at it. Okay once again, this little orange bar here represents our frequency spectrum at that point. As you can see, it's before the Vco. We we turned on our Vco here.

so there's no frequency output at all. Okay, there's no carrier signal at all. but as soon as we switch it on bang Here we go. We're Wh we switched on.

There we go. we're switched on. There's our Command as well. So we've turned on the Vco and we're setting.

We've sent our Command, we're sending our Command to our Um our voltage controlled oscillator and you can see the Carri is at 2.2 gig. And as we as we scroll across here, we can see the Uh frequency slowly changing 2.8 GHz There you go. 2 uh sorry, 2.3 2 .3 2.39 2317, 2.3 48 GHz And as you can see because the Uh, the Uh phase lock loop isn't stable yet, it's still it's still moving. but as our Spectrum moves across here in time in the time domain.

So this is where we're comparing our this is where we're using our cross domains, we're using our frequency domain and our time domain. with our mixed signal digital as well. Well, throwing in for good measure and as you can see, it's starting Bingo right about now it's 2.4 GHz Spot on. and there you go.

it's stable bang so it takes roughly that amount of time for it to become stable and you can see that on the Pl voltage. Brilliant! How incredibly powerful. Oh, you got to get one of these babies and just remember, you wouldn't be able to do this on a regular DSO with FF T capability. even if it had a high enough uh uh sample rate.

uh to actually uh, get a 2.4 GHz uh carrier and then do an Fft of it. you would need, um, a massive uh amount of time to actually sample that. But because we've got a frequency uh Spectrum analyzer built in, it's easy. It just captures it.

Brilliant. And this is where our wave inspector uh control here is very nice. I've got to admit, it is one of the better Uh features of the tectronics. These high-end tectronics.

uh Scopes it really is, uh, nice. and uh, once again, the outer ring is the Uh pan so it allows us to pan the window across now. I've zoomed in here so we can actually see the SPI Uh packets here. and as you can see, it's got another little Uh display up here to show you where in the memory.

That's the entire memory depth of the scope from side to side there and that little uh window if we use our Zoom control here which is the outer one, we can actually make that smaller and we're zooming in. or we can make it bigger like that and you can see so that window there correlates to what you're seeing on the display and that yellow bar there correlates to our frequency spectrum there. so we can, um, depending on how much uh sample memory you've uh chosen, you can zoom in as far as you'll like and uh, we can actually see the um the data bytes in the SPI on the SPI bus in in this case, but you got to have the SPI analysis module to actually do that. And of course, you got a play and pause button here.

so you can actually just press that play button and it just Auto Scrolls across just like you can get on the agilant um Scopes as well and you can change the uh uh change, change the direction using the pan button like that and you can uh, zoom in and zoom out at the same time and you can make it go faster by just moving your outer pan controls Zoom Great fun! and you've also got uh markers as well which can be handy for actually um, uh, actually marking uh events and stuff like that. so actually time correlated events. so you just press Mark there you can see it's put a triangle at that particular point because that's uh, where we had the rising Edge and say you wanted another one where the Vco you know started to uh, sorry, the uh PLL started to mark up there. You could set another one and then maybe another one out here if you had some other event and then you could just, uh, jump between the events.

so that's you know. that's pretty handy, but that's pretty standard on Scopes these days. But it works well and we're getting on to more of the Osilloscope features now and it's got search capability as well. You can actually um, search for events in the Uh store domain if you.

So if you turn the search on and you choose the different D types here, Edge you can search for run pulses and Rise and Fall time uh, variations and things like that so that's fairly powerful if you hit the test button up here and you've got uh, various uh, applic modules installed in this mask, limit testing, and power analysis. If we choose power. um, if we switch on the power thing, we can measure stuff like like the Ripple uh, Power modulation, the uh, safe operating area. um, absolutely brilliant.

uh and what what else we got? uh Power quality? um, Switching loss I Haven't actually, uh, got these hooked up to a you know, a switching power supply or something like that to actually, uh, measure stuff, but that looks like incred L powerful functionality. If you pay for it, let's try the dreaded Auto set button shall we and see what we can see how long it takes and hey, it's jumping around all over the place. There, it looks like it's gone into partial uh, that, um, safe operating area graphing Bingo it's up. We've got ourselves a waveform.

Okay, tectronics. It's time to explain this one. Uh, I You know I Can understand why you've gone for five, uh, vertical divisions each side of the uh, uh Center graticule. Here, you've gone one more than the traditional four.

Fine. But then we end up with a nonsquare graticule like that I Just find that rather disconcerting. I don't particularly like it. And here's another thing which I'm going to do.

Let's CH Let's take a look down here at the horizontal. Okay, here it is horizontal. 100 nond per division? No problem. Let's take it back.

one 200 nond. it's gone the one two step. No problems. You expect it to go in the traditional 125 Step 12 4 400 NCS What every scope ever invented has one steps of 125 125, 125 Why 124 I Don't get it And we can change the graticule type here.

it's in the Uh utility menu down the bottom here and uh, we can change it to a standard grid solid I Kind of like that one and you can and uh, use the Uh intensity and the Um intensity up here and you've got the A and the B control. Uh A controls your waveform intensity so we can turn that waveform down. There we go and we can turn the graticule intensity down I I Actually prefer just the solid, the old, uh, traditional solid line one like that. And here's a neat feature down here: we've got the Uh trigger frequency readout, so if we switch that on bang, we got our trigger frequency down here and it shows that we're uh, precisely 35741 mahz and that must be done using a hardware frequency counter and we can do a Uh snapshot here.

We can add some measurements and do a um okay or a snapshot of all the Uh things just as you can get on most. Scopes Fairly basic, but I'm not really keen on the Uh process of having to go into uh, add measurement here, select your Source, use the A button here, and then uh and then use your B button uh, your B knob here to select these sort of things. but I you know it's just personal preference I Guess you get used to it. but once you are in this menu here, it is easy to, uh, just go across once again.

I Prefer that button to be pushable so that you know you can just, uh, move along and then push something like that. That's much better. But anyway, I've added uh, a couple of measurements down here and uh, we've got our Peak to Peak our rise time, our four time, and our frequency so that's pretty good. and you can get uh and it automatically displays the um, the mean, the min max, and the standard deviation and you can get uh histograms as well.

and you can get a vertical histogram here of inside that uh, rectangular box there. Brilliant stuff. I Love it! And of course, one of the big impressive Uh features of these series: Scopes The 4,000 series not only the DSO MSO and the Mdo um, they got 20 meg points memory and you can change that by going into the acquisition menu and uh, hitting the record length and once again, you can't just uh, press that and cycle through like you can on the agilant ones I much prefer that uh, you've got to go over to the button of course, the knob sorry and uh, you can select anywhere anywhere from 1,000 points per second and it's much faster at the lower ones I Believe Uh, 10K uh. sample memory is the default 100K 1 Meg and then you go up to uh, you know, all the way up to 20 meg.

Fantastic! As I said right at the start, the uh, this oscilloscope and the all of the tectronics ones are no match for the new agilant. uh X Series oscilloscopes. In terms of Uh speed and just waveform updates per second, the Agilant have got a million waveform updates per second and you've seen that. so uh, I know you want to see it on this one.

So I'm going to show you uh, what? I'm generating is a signal that that has a glitch uh pulse once every 1 million. Cycles Now this, um, the 4,000 series tectronics ones have acclaimed 50,000 waveform updates per second and uh, and actually maximum. So that's 20 times less than the Agilant 1 million. So we'd expect to uh, capture this.

uh one this 1 millionth uh pulse? Uh, roughly every uh TW not once per second as you do on the Ulent, but every 20 seconds or so. So if we clear the persistence like this, um, basically on average it, it will be uh, 20 seconds before it. uh, captures that. It may capture it before May capture after.

but if you do a whole bunch of them, on average, it hasn't captured. Oh, Bingo There we go. Was that 20 seconds near enough? Um, so I've set this to infinite persistence here so that it will. Oh, it just got another one there.

Exactly the same and uh, as you can see, it is. But here's the key: I'm in the record length of 1K and uh, it doesn't tell the specs, don't uh, tell you? at least not that I could find what the waveform updates per second were at what record length? and I think as you go up in the record length? it will uh change. Oh no, it looks like 10K is pretty quick as well. So but let's go to 100K and uh, see what happens.

and as you see as I change, scroll through that menu. it automatically. uh, selects that so you don't have to select it, you just have to scroll through and it automatically changes things for you or don't like that. I'd like to be able to scroll and select please.

But anyway, as you can see, we're at 100K points record length and well, I'm not going to leave the camera running so I'll let you know how long it takes. Oh, there we go, Got it. Let's try the longer record lengths. One really annoying thing here.

I'm not sure if I can get it, but this, uh, as I scroll through, it seems to lock up occasionally. look look I'm I'm I'm moving that and it didn't it didn't move that menu option. it seems to seems to lock up once it's on 20 meg. I don't know, look see I'm spinning that and it and it just sort of locks up.

and that's what I generally find about this scope and it's really quite annoying is that things are very laggy and and slow and it's just I don't know. It just really kind of bugs me. I'd expect I expected more I expected faster and better instant performance like you get on the agilant ones for you know, a basically a $30,000 oscilloscope modern one on the one uh Meg sample memory I was actually able to capture that one in 18 seconds. but I think I'm lucky.

Uh, because it's taken a hell of a lot longer than that. It's now a minute past that and it hasn't captured a second one yet. But yeah, I think I just got lucky. but it seems it's definitely slower as you go up in the memory depth.

and we're up to 5 minutes here. and I've got it on 10 Meg points and it hasn't even captured the first one yet. That that trans 5 minutes translates to only uh, 3,000 waveform updates per second And it it still hasn't triggered it. So it's less than 3,000 for sure.

Well, it could be either side. You got to take an average of these things, but getting a bit tired of waiting? it's as slow as a wet week. 10 minutes. This is getting ridiculous I think I'll go eat dinner and I think I officially give up at uh 20 minutes that equates to uh, less than 830 odd waveform updates per second.

Now I I Know this uh, waveform updates per second rate changes with the uh time base. Um, but uh, this is a direct comparison to the Agilant one. So I don't think it's uh, unfair at all. Um, so yeah, this thing's got so much dead time.

I think I'll go out the back and bury it. Check out this weird anomaly I'm I'm going to uh, press the uh trigger uh level over here to actually um, press in the knob to set it to 50% and watch the display. look at that still what? what is that? unbelievable And let's do a test to see if we get any alias in let's turn. that's a 20 mahz sine wave.

by the way, let's turn it down and yep, we do. check it out Alias City but of course you won't get that if you choose a longer uh, memory depth like one. Mega we're still getting something there and then 10 Meg No, it's all. she's all still sweet.

There we go. I'll show you a little trick with uh determining the waveform update rate of a scope. Here's a little trick how you can actually measure it now. Uh, what I'm doing is I've actually got uh, the output the Uh trigger output on the back of the tectronic scope.

Okay, that auxiliary output here. it is the Ox output. I've got it set so that the output, um, it. it gives a pulse every time it uh, triggers and starts a capture.

so Bingo Using by measuring the output frequency of that uh trigger event, we can determine the waveform update rate directly in Hertz. So I've got it hooked into the frequency counter up here on the Agilent And basically you want to look at the Uh mean frequency here. So here it is 4 khz. So if we get out of here, that is the waveform update rate.

You want to take the mean uh frequency out of that. but it's basically 4 KZ 4,000 waveform updates per second at this current uh time base. So we can now determine uh, where are we? we're at 100 Nano uh per Division And that's the and the waveform update rate isn't isn't really uh, changing a huge amount uh there between uh, when I change the time base. but if I take it down there we go.

You'll see the Uh waveform up here change. So let's see I'm at Uh 20 NS per division down here measuring a 20 MHz uh input signal and uh, we're basically getting if I reset the stats up there. you probably can't see that, but I'll tell you it's uh, 4 khz or 4,000 or 3,000 Uh samples uh, waveform updates per second. uh basically and uh, that's with only one channel going and a uh th only a th000 only a 1K uh sample memory.

and if we change that to 10K you'll see it doesn't actually uh, change that frequency at all. So 100K and 10K are the same. So is 100 K sample memory. But if we drop it down to a Meg Bingo look at that, we've dropped down to 1K uh 1,000 waveform updates per second.

And if we go up even further to 10 Meg We There we go exactly the same Uh time base and we're uh, looking at Um 20 basically at 200 waveform updates per second and we go down to 20 meg sample points and whoa, we're not even not even in the ballpark here 20 hzz. So there you go: 20 waveform updates per second at that particular Uh 20 nond per division time base with Uh 20 meg sample memory. So that's a neat way that you can actually measure the Um waveform update rate of a scope. Now watch this as you you can see the Uh.

you can see the pulses, the trigger pulses there and they're basically that far apart or 1 and a half divisions or thereabouts now. I've only got one channel on at the moment I've got 1,000 Um 1K Sample memory. Let's turn on a second Channel see if it makes a difference. No, it doesn't.

So obviously the waveform updates per second stay the same with one and two channels on. Let's turn the third channel on. and hey, Bingo look at that it it has doubled the waveform updates per second has halfed to 1.5 um, uh K waveform updates per second. So there you go.

If you switch on four, it's exactly the same, so it looks like there's a uh, there's one chip uh, inside handling uh two channels. but as soon as you turn on the second Channel Bingo you have your wave form updates per second. So let's turn off number four there and let's turn off number two and no. So so there you go.

Maybe there's not a chip sharing, it's just uh, once you go more than two channels. so I can turn on channel one and channel 4 and uh, it has the same update rate but as soon as I turn on a third C