Dave, Reason #17: Measurement Stability. High-end scopes have guaranteed measurement across operating temperature range, usually -10 C to +60 C, that's due to careful individual component selection for temp drift and thermodynamic design of the case for sufficient cooling by heat sinks and fans. The same goes for magnetic shielding and electromagnetic interference, to insure consistent results.
@@shazam6274 no, completely wrong. I have scopes going back to Hp. I also have Keysight. These cheap scopes are markedly inferior to those, as they are to the TEK scopes I’ve used. He really does explain it well in the video. Maybe you didn’t bother to watch it, or most of it. The cheap models are fine for lower end uses where consistency and adherence to standards and traceability aren’t important. But there’s no guarantee with these that every scope they sell will give the same results. There’s no guarantee that they will hold accuracy over a month, much less a year. If that’s ok for you, then go for it.
Thanks Dave! It is true that most hobbyists normally do not worry about "living within an ecosystem". But it is very important for professional use. Big T&M companies spend a lot of time and resources to ensure that a collection of their instruments play well together, offering something which is greater than the sum of individual parts.
hilarious how none of these channels - follow the basic rules on YT. especially Signal path that is so lubricated to the moon and back by vendors and constantly concludes that the YT-rules don't apply for his channel - as he is special.. ua-cam.com/video/HWtOAWWY010/v-deo.html Gone berserk the last 5 years and its a shame YT don't start to hand out strikes to channels that again and again.. are not willing to click the p4ld pr0m0tion boxi the pursue to get some transparency on these matter and the viewers have a channel to conclude what is influencer-4dv4rtising and what aint... gone berserk the last 5 years... not least from CN. as a danish shareholder in alphabet inc... either you have rules or you dont.
As an aerospace EE I was able to use all of the brands of scopes. Rigol for lab prototyping, medium priced Tek or Agilent scopes for brassboard flight electronics development and test systems, and higher end scopes on one of a kind rad-hard spacecraft flight instruments that take years to develop and are worth $100mil or more (Hubble, Kepler, James Web, etc).
@@SciMoTeAr Just that we had the flexibility to use test equipment appropriate for the task, and not just all expensive Tek scopes for everything for example.
I looked at the question where someone asked "what the point of the post was". Thought for a minute and if remove the emotion out of that question it is not a bad question. You can ask yourself the question before you put anything out what the point is. By itself that is a good thing. As someone who read the post I found the information interesting and it added to the discussion. I'm slightly worried this will end up in some insult war but I can also see that comment can be viewed as insulting if you add emotion ot the equation. So what I'm curious to find out is that I cannot look into your heart and I wonder if it is possible to cut emotion out when you answer my question when I ask you a question. The question is that what information were you looking for when you asked them "What the point of the post was? " That really is a bit of a problem since this might have been a serious question which when I look at it without emotion is not a bad question but if you take what is normal in the environment I'm in could maybe be considered as a bit insulting and I wondered if that was your intention and you were curious. I think ultimately a lot conflicts including wars can be avoided since we assume someone's intention based on our own cultural background. One example in Japanese culture it is impolite to say No. So even if the answer is No it is possible that someone will say yes just because they don't want to offend . If you don't know this is a funny story if the importance of answer is low. However in some situations you really need to know and I'm not familiar with Japanese culture to tell you how that works and I would say within the culture it's likely not a problem but when they interact with other cultures it can become a problem. Also I mean no disrespect to other cultures the culture I am in has i'ts own oddities it's just that I'm used to deal with them so they are subjectively normal to me and probably objectively abnormal if I would spend more time thinking about them.
25-30 years ago as an import broker. Techtronix was one of my major clients. I'd bring in container loads of components for them. I had no idea their finished product was that expensive.
Back in the days of CRO (Cathode Ray Oscilloscope) analog scopes, Tek made some amazing scopes. They were regarded as the absolute best in business. Like the Tek 465B is in my opinion still one of the best scopes ever made. I have one that I just absolutely love to use.
@@SirMoyes, around the early DSO era tek really dropped the ball, their DSOs where TERRIBLE. having used these (the tds 220 to be specific) the screens especially are bad, even for the late 90s. its like drawing with a leaking pen.
Calibration and "Bankability" is a big deal; Even as a small startup, we worry about this kind of stuff: We needed a SourceMeter for a contract recently, and Tek (who now owns Keithley) still supports calibration on their 2420 SourceMeters- A product that has been out for ~25 years now. There are (cheaper) options available, but we're using the 2420 to validate performance of some new innovations in the PV industry, and the better and more trustworthy the data, the more likelihood we'll get of proving our product: It's not worth the time to justify cost savings of a kbuck or so if you're trying to test and validate things that scale into mass production. I appreciate the explanation of this, as it's something that catches people by surprise if they haven't ever thought about the reliability and accuracy of their measurements.
100% And when lives, even the safety of a nation depends on reliable and effective field engineering having a portable SA that let's you easily and reliably work on Microwave or VHF transmitters and radar is "mission critical" and Textronics delivered by real MilSpec gear that you could trust with your life and the others whom you serve. That's worth $100k for the SA, input mixers and probes and reference generators that they delivered to compliment the SA. And from that cheaper systems were developed that could serve a young telecom company. HP dominated for so long that it took a huge leap in tech to earn the trust of brand loyal engineers and techs. What's more their test equipment was good enough to use that a 19yo Sailor could learn it solidly in a few days of school. I lived to work with it on my radar gear.
Work story: we spent over $20k on a "high end" Rigol scope, diff probes, etc etc. Lo and behold, a couple months later and dozens of messages with their support and we still couldn't get a clean eye diagram from a BASE100T signal (measured on multiple examples including an FPGA signal emulator). They kept on pushing a "solve the measurement problem" type solution rather than giving us any sort of specifications on noise floor or accepting the unit as defective. As soon as we started discussing refunds the service and customer manegement personal ghosted us. We ended up paying our own shipping and returning the equipment, and making a chargeback against the purchase with no responses from them at all. Maybe they're okay for hobbiests just trying to get something for their Arduino projects, but for any serious work they shouldn't even be looked at.
Know exactly where you are coming from here, I once spent 2 days trying to figure out why a trace wasn't right on my Rigol scope only to eventually realise it was a firmware issue. This is why at work they spend the extra money on Keysight so they aren't paying for engineers to waste time fault finding the instrument. For my own projects the Rigol is fine because although frustrating it isn't a huge problem when I hit problems but at work that can end up costing thousands in wasted time or rework. If money was no object I would have a Keysight at home in a heartbeat.
Hi. I understand your frustration but I must say that if I want to make very tricky measures like you did, I would go for a higher end mfr. The lower end oscilloscopes are either for retail consumers who cannot afford a costy thoroughly designed equipment or for very generic measurements like simple analog or digital inspections but surely not for qualifications, certifications of protocols like Ethernet, USB, Displayport, DDR, etc... if you have offices full of willing HW engineers, many working on different projects and different aspects of their designs may want to do series of measures at the very same time and cannot afford to wait for one of the 4 submitted to schedule cutting edge MSO, most of all for a simple clock frequency, an I2C bus analysis, a 1kHz PWM duty cycle evaluation, Arduino projects debugging or an audio signal. That is where you Rigol or Siglent made material intervenes.
Sorry, I don't work on the high end, I bring an oscilliscope to work (rather dirty field environment, in almost every way imaginable) for the really nasty troubleshooting, all of my other techs are rather impressed, many hardly ever heard of such equipment. all under 10Mhz, no need to lug, and likely break a $2000+ tool when a $300 one will do. for the rare, occasional work that demands such, I rent them. Don't get me wrong, I certainly do see a need for expensive equipment, just not usually in my area of expertise. If and when it becomes necessary to purchase such, I will happily do so however.
Even for home/hobbyist use I don’t recommend Rigol any longer. I made the mistake years ago with one the worst function/arbitrary waveform generator I ever had the misfortune to use. It won’t output a correct amplitude when doing AM modulation for example if you turn off and on the modulation the carrier amplitude would increase and etc. It wasn’t a defective unit, as returned and second one did exact same thing. They never fixed it in firmware in at least the couple years had it before cutting losses and selling it. I ended up replacing it with a Tektronix afg3102 and that one works as expected. Then the Rigol RF signal generator was junk as well and would freeze up at random and then started to have very poor modulation quality all the sudden. Then the lack of support. I ended up replacing it with a couple older HP RF signal generators a 1 GHz and a 3.2 GHz that much older and had to repair the 1 GHz one as brought broken with a shorted mosfet in PSU due to failed Rifa capacitor, but was NOS never used and way better then the sorry Rigol crap.
Lucidly argued, Dave. Outstanding. So many people blinded by how good cheaper kit can be overlook the simple fact that major govmt contracts require auditing a manufacturer's supply chain for compliance - this was one of the big points that stood out for me.
There was a time in my life i would only consider Tek or Hp. Then I started my consulting business and now I buy Rigol and Siglent. Tek and Hp better in just about every category but its not the price difference better. Rigol not better but usually good enough. There are times i need the Tek so I borrow it. Nice to have friends with toys.
I also have to wonder about the trickle down argument from high end manufacturers into their own low end scopes. These days it feels more like the adaption from the low end segment forces the larger manufacturers to include (often easy aka software) features in their lower end models, not because they may have pioneered them. I mean in about every industry you try to (atrificially) keep the status of your high end segment up for as long as possible, despite tech advances having made it easily feasible to include them in low end devices. If anything, measuring gear is one of the few industries that still get away with selling already present hardware capability via software upgrades for ludicrous prices. So I will keep cheering for the low end manfacturers, because they are the only ones that apply at least some pressure to that industry; maybe Fluke will one day ship DMMs with decent test leads again this way.
@@ignispurgatorius5297 The high end manufactures do feel pressure of an ever decreasing customer base. And may one day have to adapt or die. At this point I figure I will never afford an hp and I think they are many people like me. So where as once upon a time you just glanced at the low end market now you stay locked in on it. I went to school on Hp Tek and Fluke yet the first multi meter I bought for my daughter was a uni t. Her first scope likely a Siglent. She won’t grow up in the world I did and I wonder if Tek and hp recognize that.
@@EfieldHfield_377 does NOT matter what "industry" you are in there is an ever growing divide between "consumer" and TRADE" tools and in MY opinion it is getting WORSE and FLUKE / TEK and "friends" are MOVING MORE EXPENSIVE and "away" from home consumer markets they "have" to offer the $1k "education" units to have the next generation using there products and there work flows and to "indoctrinate" students into the "professional" brands for 80% of shops a top spec "hobbyist" brand is a better tool then a LOWER tier "professional" brand
@@jasonriddell Their business model will have to change. What they called hobby are a lot of seasoned engineers like myself doing real work for real money. The young people I mentor I use Siglent Rigol GW and BK and that’s my general preferred order. With the exception of hand held DMM I don’t buy outside of those brands.
I would guess any brand that has sensible calibration prices and accessory compatibility should be pretty good. Of course, when you have big enough house, you want to standardize everything and then longetivity of product may be the most important factor.
As someone who uses scopes that cost 3-5x what that 2 series do, it's about measurement stability, the ecosystem of accessories (I have a number of odd and special purpose probes with excellent integration), and the support you get from an established company (I have a high level tech at Agilent's personal cell number).
For motor controls development and dynamometer setups where higher accuracy, a lot of channels and long term logging is important there are other companies like Yokogawa that makes the scopecorder which have very useful specialized features. No affiliation with them just a big fan and wanted to mention another expensive name in the biz that has a lot of good reasons which weren't mentioned to charge as much as they do
a "specialized" device for a "small" sub segment is ANOTHER reason the "professional" brands are "worth" more then "consumer" brands the scopecorder sells in VERY small number I imagine like the super high bandwidth Tek scopes and in some cases those companies will make/modify custom equipment for ONE customer
@@jasonriddell I'm confused. Are you agreeing or being sarcastic, you have way too many "quotes" in that comment When there exists equipment with features that save a lot of engineering time and are able to do so reliably it's worth a lot of money. The scope corder has features like high resolution and high frequency sampling with modularity for a huge variety of channel types which makes a lot of sense for some things. They're also not actually that expensive compared to the 5 series Tek scopes for example
I love my 50 year old 60 MHz Tek analog scope. It's as good as the day it was made, just the thing for debugging Arduino and ESP32-based projects. Tek rocks!
Same as with Fluke, Keithley, HP, Agilent etc. It's a well recognized real deal pro gear name across the whole electronics industry in the world. Tektronix has always been a very high quality brand. They haven't been popular here in Poland because they were so expensive and Western (remember the Iron Curtain? we could do with our own, Soviet, GDR, Czechoslovak etc. gear, none of that capitalist rubbish! haha) so there's very little vintage Tek gear running around, and if something pops up, it can run into thousands. Definitely not for my teeny tiny budget. Personally, I've only got a 410 physiological monitor in my collection; it's extremely well built, gold-plated PCB, well thought out assembly, touchy feely controls, just sweeeeeet! A thing of beauty and a joy for ever. BTW I had a '70s Polish knockoff-of-a-Tek all tube scope model OS-102, loved that stuff, it was beautifully built, but in no way it compared to the original. Geez, I wish I hadn't sold it... would love to have it in my lab now. Or a Tek for that matter.
As a Lecroy Guy (Education, First 2 Companies I was working in) my workflow was really trimmed down to their specific UI. In the new company we decided to buy some new scopes and compared (and tested) similar scopes from the big 4. They all offer more or less the same bang for the buck. Having 6 devs favoring Tek against 2 favoring Lecroy made the decision quite easy. Long story short, the homelab market isn’t worth competing (to much competition in this segment) but edu really is the big deal.
Sensible words Sir. I bought a very basic Tek TDS1002 (50Mhz 1Gs) scope a little over 20 years ago. In the time I have had/used it, two faults occurred and both rectified. The first to appear was the self-launching power button that always caused the button to disappear under the bench for a few days. A spot of high-strength epoxy sorted THAT one. After a few years of use the second was a curious intermittent reset of the scope every once in a while - mostly when the scope was being used to monitor vehicle stuff and therefore moving about all the time. I investigated and found the EURO mains power socket was a VERY crappy design that was not electrically coherent all the time. File, big ass soldering iron and lots of solder later - fixed forever. This scope has performed perfectly up to its limitations for me in respect of measurement and diagnostic tool in all the time I have had it. Yes, I have an OWON w/battery. Great concept - not finished. MAJOR generic problem with the rotary encoders for gain and time-base. SUPER flaky. I have seen other china-origin scopes with the same problem. Part of the problem seems to be the clumsy way the panel multiplex is done. Very crappy signaling. But the encoders are ALSO most certainly physically defective components. A big shame in my view. Otherwise, OWON has slotted themselves into a nice niche in the low-end scope market. Received your 'winner' response. I do not have a bat phone - or a Crocodile Dundee knife. [ Not fussed with merch mate ]. Keep on truckin' chap.
I will probably stick with Keysight scopes for a long time, as it's what I was trained on and worked with and I am very familiar with them.. But I gotta say I am also starting to warm up to R&S scopes. 🥰
I went to an auction for my cities school district and bid on some Tek gear. I won and am now the proud owner of a 570 tube curve tracer and a 555 . I got them home and started to look them over and the 555 is the same one that I used in Mr. Bihar's class in 1971! Some clown had carved his name on the side of it and it was on this one. I checked it over and powered it up (current limited) and she came to life like it was 50 years ago. THAT is why Tektronix is so expensive. My dad was a radar engineer at GE and he told to always buy HP test gear at government surplus sales because they never got used because all the techs wanted to use the Tektronix gear so the other stuff just sat there unused.
This was really important for me when I was doing research for my thesis. I was gathering data on the stability of oscillators for time keeping purposes to determine what sort of reliability could be expected for a particular device. When you're measuring error though, the first question you're going to get asked is "How can you be sure that the error is in the device under test and not your test equipment?". If I had used a scope from eBay, I would have had to have done a lot of extra work to try and have a convincing answer to that question, and it would likely be really challenging to defend. However as I had invested in higher end scope, I was simply able to present the certificate of calibration, making this a complete non-issue. Granted not everyone cares about that stuff, but when you do, you *really* do.
alternatively you have to "prove" to your client that you can REPEAT the results and that likely would pre require a validation sequence of the "ebay" scopes likely more then one and the savings would be eaten up on the pre validation / buying redundant units to cross check with ETC
My early career in radio & electronic spoiled me. I was in the Military and then Broadcasting. Everything was Tek, Fluke, HP, Racal and Rhode & Schwartz.
I don't deal with this stuff so it might be very different, but in my dealings, mostly with computers, software and networking I have noticed more and more recently that support might as well be nonexistent. Also confidence has been very much eroded away with the big major enterprise companies having huge problems with bugs and security holes, like Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, and more. Given that I have seen this consistent across many industries even outside of what I mentioned above I have to question here how much of this is currently the case vs just people and companies relying on the history. Maybe this area hasn't been hit with this, or maybe it has. In any case the point is that in my experience relying on a company's past actions and products as an indicator of current quality of products and support is often misguided.
Dell, Microsoft, and to a lesser degree Cisco are in a very different situation than companies like Tektronix. They're huge companies and they offer high-end stuff, but the companies as a whole don't rely on the high end market. Unless you're buying tens of millions of dollars worth of their product, they don't notice you exist. A better comparison would be companies like Stratus and NetApp. They deal with low volume enterprise-level products as their main source of revenue. Customer relations is vital to them because their sales are driven by their reputation. Their products are expensive enough that it's worth it to them to send a representative to your office to try to convince you to buy them, and it's worth it to them to keep the IT folks happy.
@@jeffspaulding9834 I have dealt with far more than Dell Microsoft and Cisco. I have dealt with small companies, medium companies and big companies and the consistent things that I have observed are that you either spend so much money that it is in no way worth it, like you could easily run some open source software yourself and hire dedicated staff to manage it for less, or you get support that is so bad it might as well not exist, or even be better if it didn't.
@@jeffreyparker9396 That's assuming you can get qualified personnel to work the open source software. NetAPP is a good example of this - it does nothing that you couldn't do with a couple FreeBSD boxes and a few disk arrays, but IT staff have to have a deep understanding of clustered redundancy, ZFS, iSCSI/MPIO, and basic UNIX administration in order to pull it off. Whereas NetAPP customer support will call you and tell you that you have a drive failing and the replacement is already in the mail. When you consider how much you have to pay for that expertise, the price NetAPP charges doesn't seem so bad.
@@jeffspaulding9834 I have not had a problem finding qualified personnel. It is also not too crazy to learn, I learned enough of that stuff in a couple of weeks pretty easily. I haven't dealt with NetApp, but I have dealt with EMC and their support that was supposed to do the same thing, but it took far longer to fix it to work as they wanted before they would come out to fix a problem then it would have taken to just setup a newer storage system and therefore would have saved quite a bit of money. To really compare I would have to know the cost of NetApp, but from what I have seen, the cost is still far in favor of building your own, running something like truenas.
@@jeffreyparker9396 We do have problems finding qualified personnel, and even more problems justifying them. Windows admins are a dime a dozen. That's what we get, because 99% of our system is Mickeysoft-based. Most of them wouldn't know iSCSI from a roast beef sandwich and think fiber channel is part of the Discovery network. So we'd need at least two people knowledgeable enough to build and maintain these systems (because you know one will always be on vacation when something happens). The service contract for NetAPP is significantly less than the salary of even one of these guys. So whenever something happens, we find the Windows admin who's eaten the least paste and have NetAPP support walk him or her step-by-step through swapping out a drive or a controller. The only time any of us has to understand the thing is when we're doing the initial design and setup. That's usually me. It's worth their while to pay me to design and set it up, but I'm expensive so they have much better use for my time than babysitting storage appliances. Maybe companies that are willing to pay for more experienced IT folk don't have that problem. We do, and I know we're not the only ones. (Just to be clear - I know there are good Windows admins out there. But there's a lot of bad ones out there, and they're cheap. Troubleshoot-by-Google works for most of our problems so it's not as bad as it seems.)
Well, just to leave my thoughts here, this is absolutely the reason I will only get (used) high tier scopes: I have a Tektronix 453A scope (very very old stuff for sure, but I use it mostly for audio and vintage repair). Now I fished it out of a cellar where it was stored for at least 10 years, a dank dusty dirty cellar. When I got it we measured it... and it was bang on cal, perfectly in spec except the inverting amplifier on ch2 everything else was working perfectly on a scope that was manufactured 50 years ago and spend 10 years stuck in a moist dirty abandoned cellar. Now I don't know about your rigol or hantek scope... but will it do that?
Clear story. Clear difference between professional and hobby usage. As the words say it, if used for professional purposes one needs to trust the measurement, as the company would cost actually more if they use the buggy low end equipment. Companies make many using the high end equipment and one part of the price is based on that. For a hobby use a whole different story.
In the old days, most manufacturers had the small components soldered to terminals on phenolic terminal strips. But Tektronix components were soldered to silver inserts embedded in ceramic strips. And you were advised, when making a repair, to use silver bearing solder. Regular solder would, allegedly, cause the bond between the insert and the ceramic to weaken. Tektronix did, sort of, have a line of "economy" scopes. They became the distributor for the British company, Telequipment. Telequipment scopes were pretty decent (I have one, a D54, and like it). Those scopes, for instance, employed fiberglass PC boards, not the phenolic ones that were more common.
Now that's a name from the dim and distant past - Telequipment. I used to use Telequipment scopes and yes they were ok, but when all was said and done for me it was a "Real" Tek scope every time. I recently bought a Tek 475 for very general low end electronic work. Still works and to my knowledge may still have many if not all the original components !!!!!!!!.
@@brucepickess8097 That's a coincidence! At this very moment, I'm buying a Tek 475A, off of Ebay. Back in the 80s, I used a 465 at work. So I know I'll like the 475A, 'cause it's a little better. My other scope is an NLS MS-215, which I paid WAY too much for. Why? Because when they first came out in the late 70s (the 15, 215, and 230), I just HAD to have one, because they were so cute. And it DOES run circles around those cheapie, palm-sized, Chinese wonders (I actually bought one of those, not for the scope, but because it was also an RCL meter/component tester).
@@brucepickess8097 "Good and bad," regarding scopes, must be judged according to the time period. Back then, any scope with triggered sweep was a "lab grade" scope, beyond the means of hobbiests, technicians, and small repair shops. Universities and R&D labs had them, but we peasants had to make do with recurrent sweep models, which, as often as not, had AC only coupling.
Higher brands had more software support for automated messering systems. And most of them had "low" price solutions or brands, so Rhode und Schwarz had Hameg. My first was a Hameg and it is running fine more than 40years later.
I have to agree about the low end. Just over a decade ago, I bought an Agilent DSO1024A. It looked essentially identical to one that Rigol was making at the time. The scope has been pretty good from an operating standpoint, but the firmware/user interface is crap. From the buttons and knobs not responding quickly or giving "double taps" when pressed, to the overall feel and menu structure on the buttons. I have never checked to see if they updated the firmware for the scope to improve it. Maybe I should.
When schools decide to upgrade a labful of test gear, you will see stuff like pallet loads of nice identical scopes etc. and often get them at steal prices. A boon for the average bloke with small budget.
have seen many a LAB upgrade and sell off in bulk there "old" equipment often tied to a major upgrade to the products they make and there are companies that buy these and refurbish them to sell to "home/mom and POP" shops and have seen "top 4" brands for RIGOL pricing and I would "trust" a used PRO scope over a low cost "consumer" scope
Every Engineer I've talked to hates the interface for the 5 & 6 series Tektronix Oscilloscopes. Operating it with one hand while probing a board is a nightmare. For that reason, I've seen more & more switch back to the DPO & MDO series.
The real reason: It's the "Cool" factor. Tektronix has a history of making the coolest CRTs. The "Cool" factor stay associated with the Tektronix name. I worked at IBM back in the 80's. IBM had the coolest most expensive mainframe Tektronix oscilloscopes money could buy. IBM wanted their employees to feel like they were in a highly scientific environment.
I have used all sorts of brands of scopes. I grew up on Tek and currently own HP/Agilent. I've used Siglent, Rigol and also own an OWON scope. There is no comparison between the big-names and budget scopes. For a given scope across MFRs that seem to have "same specs" -- the big name scopes are going to have overall better products in some intangible way besides just costing more. My OWON Tablet scope is new to me, but built on technology that's a few years old. While my 1990's vintage HP54601 is a green-screen is over 30yrs old, the scope is overall faster. The OWON *looks* better (being color) -- but it's demonstably SLOWER in terms of display rate than the HP. The regular mode is faster, the XY mode is LOADS faster. The scope measurements are faster. My 3yr old OWOn can't even hold a candle to my 20yr old Agilent MSO6054A in terms of display rate and decode speed. The MSO decodes SPI and I2C and other protocols at line speed. The OWON can't even keep up. The OWON is my "junky disposable" high end "portable DMM with scope display" while my Agilent MSO is my "drill into designs to find what's wrong" scope. And yea -- HP/Agilent/Keysight support is *AMAZING*.
Why are Tek scopes so expensive. Lets start with a CEO and Board of Director cronies along with endless VP's and never ending layers of uneeded intermediate management that all make zillions of dollars off the backs of hard working underpaid Engineers. Forget the salaries, the money from no cost instant vesting stock options, the perks for any "expense", the lavish offices, private jet transport, limos, the hordes of entourage that supports them in the office and follows them everywhere. I worked in Silicon valley for 45 years as a Hardware Engineer thru Director, trust me on this, its fat at the top, real fat.
I have a Tek scope from the 90s that has a 3.5" floppy drive and it takes 30 seconds to write a 100kB file for a trace. In 2010 or so, I got a Tek Scope with a USB drive. Guess what, it takes the same amount of time to write to the USB memory. They obviously did not put anymore effort in other than the drive interface, the backend to the drive was the same slow speed. And these are not cheap scopes.
Thanks for this video. Actually, if I may, I will weep for some Tektronix very expensive equipment. There are MSOs like Series 5 or 6 that can easily reach k£20+ according to the options you select on them amongst which you can buy for the DDR protocol certification. So you are happy because you find oscilloscopes with at least 4GHz and 10+ GSps but the issue is that they have their logic probes TLP058 with a stupid 500MHz bandwidth and no other higher bandwidth logic probes in their catalogue. This is very frustrating! For one of my projects in the industry, I needed to qualify a 2133MTS DDR3, that is, based on a 1,066MHz clock. These Series 5 or 6 MSOs looked perfect with their up to 64 digital channels. Actually, I am still on it but I changed mfr. Anyone has managed to test DDRs with Tektronix equipments especially for many digital signals at the same time?
@EEVblog Hey Dave! What's your take on rebranded equipment? I see quite many LeCroy-branded equipment (including scopes) which in fact are Siglent under the hood. And there's a significant price difference between the same products depening on what badge is slapped on them.
real question is at a "true" rebadge OR is the LeCroy better/different IE made by Siglent WITH Teledyne patented tech inside NOT available in the Siglent units I do NOT know but that MIGHT be the "answer"
Tektronix, Keysight,...reliable? I don't think so. The TDS520, TDS540 A series with their failing capacitors. The MSO series with their failing encoders which are very expensive to replace while the encoders are just low cost plastic junk. The software bugs inn the MSO series which they like to call features (no they are not). The MSO40xx with its booting problems. The Keysight encoders on function generators and scopes which are again expensive to replace and fail after 4...5 years. The Tek THS720 with its very expensive battery pack which fails after a few years because they overcharge the battery. The TDS50xx series with their failing power supplies and failing encoders after about 8 years of non extensive use. Tektronix (Keithley) equipment full of software bugs. A DMM with data-logging capability is useless if you return to the lab and find your DMM stuck in a BOD.
for me it was All HP and NO TEKTRONIX and at grad I could buy HP equipment for personal use like 50 to 75% off a once in a lifetime deal right from HP Agilent
" Never Assume " ;) Guessing the bean counters have done this , but that is also where some issue's [ at least I see , that does not mean mch ] . But what I am gathering is creeping into society in general is " race to the bottom " at every level . So having a 2nd tier of gear , maybe even with another / new brand name , example Snap-On - Blue Point ? leave out many of the options , support ect. to partially lower the price for hobby etc. And if & when someone is ready to upgrade their bench , they have a known connection to go to . Consumer products , and labor level tools have taken over ---- and also seems to have affected general populace mind-set ? Servicing the average consumer - this is an on-going struggle / argument , that is recognised by older generations --- TV's , refrigerators & appliances in general used to last 20 yrs. - were not replaced because they failed , but were replaced to upgrade . Now those same devices are replaced 3 , 5 maybe at most 8 yrs. Let alone the marketing game buy every new model - keep up with the Jones ;) Just some thoughts ?
I get the price of Fluke meters, but the fact that I see very few Tektronics scopes in labs anymore says something… When I started in this feild every bench had a Tek….
They made a couple of scopes with user interfaces that where very, very, very slow. Cheap garbage sold for premium prices. Not sure how their latest equipement is but I don't even care to try.
@@outsideworld76 have heard a LOT of "bad" things with the early LCD TEK scopes an through to newer stuff and being "over priced" compared to likes or R&S and Keysight units
@@jasonriddell The TDS3000 series was great for it's time but also insanely price compared to nowadays scopes. I had to repair one of those units and was shocked about the poor quality of the soldering. It was a €7500,- scope from the early 2000's. Made in the USA. I guess they didn't offshore the production only for reasons of cost, also finding good employees to run the production lines was problematic.
All very nice but of no interest to a hobbyist or a retired person like me that wants to stay in electronics. I saw a Rigol osciloscope on Amazon for $3000 and I can't remember if it had 500 MHz or 1 GHz bandwidth and it had a 16 channel logic analyzer feature. I would be more interested if you could (or perhaps you already have?) evaluate the more expensive test equipment from Siglent, Rigol etc. Because I would never buy the ultra expensive test equipment from Keysight, Textronics etc. But I am willing to spend extra on some of the cheaper brands if they are worth it.
@@EEVblog Oh good, Amazon seems to have this one: RIGOL MSO5354 350 MHz Mixed Signal Oscilloscope with 4 Analog Channels and UltraVision II. Is this one any good, do you have a review for it?
@@EEVblog "NICE RIGOLS? or more VALUE minded units I would like to see the for them TOP tier scope and how far (if any) behind it is to a "top tier" scope
we have tektronix MSO 2024 Oscilloscope very expensive one for us, after three years problem started at first it is not booting so we send it to tektronics Bangalore ,after inspecting they said it is not serviceable and return it back to us, when i turned on its booting but no input signal on all channel, now our policy is no more than 1200$ for Oscilloscope , and tektronics is big NO
Right before I left the company we were deciding between two $750,000 prototype scopes from Keysight and Tek. Absolutely amazing bandwidth and features. The probes cost more than some cars. The scope seemed offended if anyone with less than a Nobel prize touched it.
Same here, we were deciding to get a 12ch tek scope to do flash characterization in our Flash controller chip. I think it costs almost a mil or something. Crazy!! But those high end scopes look and feel sooooo nice. Remote control with UI is a biggg plus
At my previous job we had a €150.000 oscilloscope that went up to 6GHz. It's nuts, I literally could capture an entire Wi-Fi 2.4GHz packet and scroll through it, looking at the phase shifts. One day I had to repair one of the probes. With a soldering iron. Because I've got a steady hand and someone broke the thing.. I actually loved using that thing. I
Yeah! Having test equipment that lasts a long time and has long term is very important. We got some new test equipment in just a month ago. Luckily all the SCPI commands are the same between the models with just a few more additional ones. We only had to change a few lines in our test code for the new equipment. (the test automation code is over 22k lines, if we run all tests it can take 18 hours to run!). So if the new equipment didn't support the old functinality......that would really suck! One test procedure (around 600 pages long) takes me a week to get through, but automated it takes 47 minutes! I would hate to have to interface to a new piece of test gear and have to rework all of that!.
Keep in mind that Tektronix, Keysight (formerly Agilent, formerly Hewlett-Packard) and other large T&M players PAID for the development of the SCPI control standard. They funded the SCPI Consortium and sent staff to sit in the committee meetings and work out the common commands and protocols for each class of instruments. I still have the original spiral-bound volumes that came out of that process. Unlike the platform-and vendor-specific instrument drivers you get in LabVIEW or whatever, you can use SCPI commands in whatever language or test environment you choose, and another qualified test engineer will be able to read and understand what you've done.
Former Tektronix engineer here: Don't think you mentioned traceability of the measurement. All measurements are traceable to a national standard and again to the definition of the measurement. This way a customer can pass the traceable measurement along in their products. This is a must for many companies. For example when Analog produces a datasheet for its amplifiers, or a fiber optic company documents the performance of the just laid transpacific fiber, or NASA qualifies a new satellite.
Thanks for the video! I bought a Siglent last winter and had a very pleasent experience operating it. When I encountered a "bug", and filed a report, I got response, with in a week. Following that I got a call from a very friendly support engineer requesting input on how to reproduce the problem. In german from their offices here, no Indian outsourced call center BS. I'd count that as "they take my request seriously", unlike some big software companies which tent to open a bug ticket with no solution until the universe heat death. Since I'm not a professional EE, I found the effort Siglent put into my problem solving very commendable. Heck a mail answer with "this is not an intented use case!" would have sufficed in my opinion. While talking to the guy on the phone he said that, Siglent wants to push upwards in the markets, and therefore intents to perform as well. I'm glad I spend the 1400 bucks on that scope and addons, rather than a "top tier" one, with half the features, but with services I do not need in a hobby environment.
I've only bought siglent bench DMMs, and of the 3 I bought, 2 would randomly lock up after a few hours of use. tech support was good and all, but that's the last siglent measurement product I'll ever buy
Totally agree with the Tek scopes being written in to procedures. I worked in the nuclear medicine field long time ago and gave factory support to branch offices supporting hospitals. If I came across a scope not being able to measure what was required, it would be very painful for the branch office. Because now the issue shifted from "your equipment is a pain to repair" to "why are you wasting everybody's time if you can't even show up with the right tools at the job?" And it did happen, occasionally because the scopes required where top of the range Tek scopes and most other medical equipment did not require exactly that. We would still help them, fly out with our own scope, etc. But the local office would get a very therapeutic bill for the effort. BTW, there is an (oddball) mid tier brand I like very much, called Picoscope. They have some very interesting products, sometimes with application focused specifications, for instance automotive or low frequency analog or embedded applications. I like this brand because it is accessible to the hobbyist but still caters to the needs of the professional market. It could be nice to have a video about this brand.
Love Picoscope. I got to use them at 6th Form College (ages 17/18 to people outside the UK). I've only ever used their entry-level USB scopes (2200 series IIRC), but they're very reasonably priced for the hobbyist and offer enough to get started with. Also being USB it's very portable and insanely useful being able to take direct screenshots and the UI is very intuitive. Also has serial decoding for pretty much any interface you care to throw a stick at. This is in no way sponsored but if you're a hobbyist with ~£100 to drop on a scope you could do a lot worse in my opinion, and that's from about 5 years of using them throughout A-Levels and Uni studies... Unless you're big into your RF or FPGAs, there's not much even the basic one can't do well enough.
@@adzib1823 I agree with you. To add to that, I was recently on their website. (I am actually thinking of buying their 16Bit 5MHz scope, exactly to use for audio amplifier projects.) I have noticed that due to component shortages, they are reducing their portfolio. And as you can imagine, the low end products suffer. That is logic because if you are limited by a chip you can buy, you want to make it count. So if you want to buy one and your favorite model is available, buy it now before that model is put on hold.
@@hugobloemers4425 Ah the chip shortage... Having just finished an internship with an electronics design consultancy firm, I now appreciate how much of an absolute nightmare it is. What you're saying wrt. the low end taking a hit makes sense - higher end gear is objectively more useful and also (usually) would command higher profit margins. It makes sense from a business point of view.
I like you think that Pico Scopes are excellent. I purchased a two channel 12 bit 256 MSa/sec, 4227 well over ten years ago and it is still going strong unlike my eight year old Tektronix MDO3024 which is dead and uneconomic to reapair. The triggering is great, noise is pretty low and the software is easy as to use.Serial decode comes with the software so you don't have to fork out money for every option. I seriously considered purchasing one of their high end systems to replace my busted MDO3024 and it was a close call between an R & S 2004 and the Pico Scope. I think Dave should do a review on a middle of the range one as they are very good. They also make some very nice probes.
Warranty? Does it offer life-time warranty for free? No, it doesn't, you pay big bucks year after year if you want a warranty. High quality components? Does the 10k+ USD Tektronix new scopes come with mini-LED HDR screen like on an Apple computer? Made in USA means better quality? Do you really believe so or have you been fed by all the China-hating propaganda for so long that you cannot tell right from wrong. Just look at your lab equipments, dare you tell us how many of them are made in USA? So you're saying only "high-end" tektronix equipments are made in USA? Does Tektronix MSO 5 Series and 2400 series SMU qualify as "high-end", which by the way are all made in China? Or, you mean only those priced 100k+ USD equipments qualify as "high-end"? "Bottom of the barrel whoever can assemble them the cheapest in China." So much prejudice in your words just lower your credibility. You probably still think it's 1980s now. Wake up, Japan and Germany, probably two of the "best" countries in your opinions have been fabricating quality control reports for decades, and re-brand Chinese made products as "Japanese" quality. "Application support"? Really? Do do have any idea how much the application options cost in Tektronix scopes? Well, for example, a MSO 5 series scope might cost you 20k+ USD, and the software option might cost another 10k+ USD. Or if you mean customer support, well, I send questions regarding price quot and never got a reply. Yes, I am a long time Tektronix equipment user. Sorry. Too much misleading info in this video. Cannot help but stop watching now.
the warranty / service coverage IS A BIG difference but it is NOT FREE and for high pace production environments having a zero day replacement program is worth $$$ over shutting down to send out your scope a mini-LED HDR display going to make the scope "better" ??? and I imagine it would be offered if it offered an advantage made in the USA is often REQUIRED for US government contracts AND utility / transit contracts and they WILL VERIFY what you are using in your work flow so sourcing is IMPORTANT in some cases and a LOT of stuff is made in CHINA BECAUSE it is the LOWEST COST so having a device designed and build for the LOWEST cost is going to be BY DESIGN "bottom of the barrel" VS companies like Tesla - Apple and TEKTROX that build in China AND maintain top quality and are NOT there for LOW COST but factory scaling OR REQUIRED localization like the comment above about made in the USA a 20K application is better then NO application for ANY price and LITTLE if ANY support
Bottom of the range Teledyne LeCroy is just a rebadged Siglent SDS5000, except more expensive and lower spec. I have just brought a R&S RTM3004 so quality is what I aim for. I don't like rebadging when it is just to hike the price.
I don’t think that you see the shift happening inside Keithley, Tektronix, Agilent and LeCroy. Their newer products are riddled with bugs, at 100k plus product range one would expect extensive debugging teams and support which we did not see from either of them. I am at the research space and there we do operate all instruments to their limits. We are very very disappointed on the latest series of scopes form all the “big four”. Their integrated bugs, issues and software problems have led several institutes in revising policies and turning towards Rohde & Schwarz and Rigol high end instruments.
I had experience working with new scope products, at a 'real' scope company (or three) and the difficulty of testing ALL of the possible interactions across the measurements and applications is a daunting task... I commonly found problems that the development team test folks had not found, because I used the scopes 6 hours per day, making every kind of measurement I could think of; the test guys were, in fact, happy that *I* found bugs, before they got to the customer!! BTW, the designers do an awful lot of work to ensure that the products work to spec across not just temperature, but all the possible internal parts variations, connector wear, multiple probes, and over time... as we say, 'non-trivial' ;-)
@@lohikarhu734 an uncle of mine worked for Tektronics and back in the day the amount of R/D and bug bounty teams WAS massive and likely larger then all of RIGOL corp I have heard that it is NOT the same anymore and much the same inside H/P instrumentation but do NOT have first hand information
At work, one fairly modern, mid-end Tektronix oscilloscope has a number of bugs, one is that voltage and time labels are the wrong way around for the cursors. I've also noticed a few other really annoying bugs.
Yep. After HP and Tek got taken over by the greedy rent seekers, engineering takes a back seat. It's all about trading on "The Brand." I went R &S to replace my Tek MDO3024. I would have had to sell the house to buy a Tektronix.
I used to work in the broadcast tv world and 90% of the test kit was Tetronix. On a live show if things broke and you needed to locate the fault then you couldn’t be messing about setting up your tools.
I'm still in broadcast engineering (AM/FM) and quality tools are indeed a necessity. I have found that, for my purposes, the abundance of features offered by a $1,000 Siglent scope are more important to me than the extreme precision and stability of a higher-end instrument. I think I might feel differently if I worked in digital television.
@@rickmartin6817 I’m slowly getting back into electronics as a hobby and recently got a siglent scope. It’s quite remarkable the features it has for the cost. 4 channels too
If you had a vintage Tek scope, and had a peek inside, the price premium reasons were obvious. They've also proved their quality over time. I'll still resort to my 465B to do the occasional test--there's nothing like an analog scope for some things...
My older low end scope had noticeable RF EMI radiation. My new Keysight 1200 series scope does not. If you do a lot of high sensitivity RF receiver work this is important! Many of these low end scopes do NOT meet their own specs! One brand supposedly 100 mhz scope only reaches 30 mhz flat. The Keysight 1200 is FLAT to the end of the bandwidth. You can actually use the damn thing to what it is advertised as! That is why you pay double. (along with the points made in the video)
Yeah, I'm 100% in the low-end market. :D My Rigol suits a lot of what I want to do, although there are things I'd like to do that I absolutely cannot afford to. Meh. Not a big deal.
There are the monster "oscilloscopes", the ones that take up half of a floor-mounted 19" rack. Long time back we had a Tektronix scope system in the lab with 120 analog channel recording capability (although we could have expanded it to 240 channels). IIRC each channel could record a gigasample at 200MHz. It was integrated with the Tektronix monster logic analyser system that filled the other half of the 19" rack. Tektronix installed an on-site system engineer to ride herd on this beast when they delivered it since it was one of the first of its type. This system was used for chip design and development, saved the company millions of dollars in turnaround time for design iterations.
I work in an educational institution. We have some of those TBS scopes, never use the educational features and Rigols have been creeping in to places outside the main labs. I suspect the only reason for buying the low end Tek scopes is to maintain a good relationship in order to buy more expensive stuff.
I thought the companies would almost be paying you to have their scopes in your institution, like Xilinx did with FPGAs in education. If you train students on platform X in school, then when they go work somewhere, they will want to use what they're already familiar with, and will thus influence the purchasing decision of the company they work for.
@@gorak9000 my experience TEK and "friends" almost "paid" to setup main labs and the "retail" price is more of a "tax" issue / private school - students to home purchase I know the tech school I went to EVERY LAB had some level of "donated" gear with the automotive makers donating whole cars and systems along with "factory" grade test equipment "read" H/P Agilent - now keysight and "snap-on" hand tools and students got a one time purchase chance at graduation from H/P Agilent and snap-on
@@gorak9000 Absolutely, just as drug companies pitch to young doctors, I still use PIC microcontrollers for low end projects for that reason; I kinda grew up with them, and if it will do the required job, within budget, I will continue to use them.
I use to be tek guy before I met Siglent. Siglent have more bang for their buck. By the time you add the options, you are 4 fold deep in. i Bought Siglent for my home lab. i am not a hobbyist. i work for ADI (Analog Devices). pretty much much of the ICs inside Tek or Siglent comes from ADI. I use Siglent scope and Spectrum Analyzer along with other stuff on daily bases. very happy with my purchase. Siglent manage to do it without compromising performance with 1/3 of price.
I do work from my home lab. I have several pieces from Siglent and Rigol. Tek and hp are better, but most of the time the Rigol Siglent is good enough. If price were no option it would be Tek Hp but price is my driving factor.
@@EfieldHfield_377 with everything there is always "better" but at what cost and for "home lab" work a siglent as long as YOU can trust its output and it does what you need it to do it is ALL YOU NEED
@@jasonriddell I make a living as an independent consultant. Took years to get comfortable with them but over time you learn the limits of what they are. For example once I needed to decode a CAN a SPI and a few other signals simultaneously the Rigol 4000 absolutely chocked. Tek ate it up. Once you know those limits and stay within bounds you are good.
@@jasonriddell One other thing I have found is I only need concern myself with the Scope and Spec An. Everything else I have desktop DMM arb gens, eLoads, LCR, Power Supply, that kind of stuff pretty much works just as good. UI can be querky at times but you get use to it.
That's right. I've been using ADI for fifty years, remember the old orange parts manual, that was my bible. Tek are just too expensive. I''ve become an R&S man now.
A few of related stories: - In my second year of college studying electronics engineering (mid-1970s), I was a starving student who desperately wanted to own an oscilloscope. I rented a basement room from some older people in a small town (they also allowed me to join them for meals at no extra charge). The husband was a almost-ready-to-retire field service technician for a major mainframe computer manufacturer, and he told me that when he went into the local branch office there were several very nice Tektronix scopes on carts that the in-house technicians used to repair circuits boards and such. He saw one of them had an "out of order" tag, and he asked his boss about it. He was told that a repairman from the local Tek office (how many other companies even had LOCAL offices?) had checked it out and said the power transformer was blown and the CRT had a lot of burn-in, and they decided to requisition a new scope rather than fix this bad one. My landlord said he had a tenant who was a struggling engineering student in need of a scope, and the paperwork was written 'writing off" that scope and it became mine. But of course it was not working, and I also had no manual for it. I asked one of my professors if I could borrow the manual for the college's lab scopes, which were in the same series (with pluggable vertical and horizontal amplifier modules) as the one I had. Perusing the manual, I saw inside the back cover a notice that Tektronix had such-and-such a long warranty, but since they manufactured their own CRTs and transformers in-house, THOSE were warrantied for "the life of the scope". My landlord asked the local Tek office to send him a copy of the service man's report, saying all the scope needed were those two items, and I send a copy to the Tektronix with a short letter (also mentioning that I had 'lost' my manual) and my address. I did not really expect to even hear back from them. About three days later, when I got home from school, my landlady said that a guy on a Tektronix van had stopped by and left two packages for me; a new CRT and a new power transformer. A couple days later, and new manual arrived in the mail. In short order, that magnificent scope was purring like a kitten again. It wasn't until years later that I realized what a nice, high end scope it was, and how lucky I was to own it, for zero expenditure of dollars. I have to wonder what the experience would have been like with today's scope manufacturers such as Rigol or Siglent !!! - I still own a fairly old Fluke digital multimeter from the mid-1970s, an original 70 series model. About once every decade, I send it back to Fluke who makes sure all is perfect and calibrated with it, and returns it with a new seal of traceable calibration, and their charge for doing this is minimal. Not many makers of multimeters will even acknowledge their older models, much less service them. - I still regularly use a couple analog scopes made by Tektronix. They still provide support for them, documentation is easily obtained. All service and calibration businesses I have had experience will will happily, readily and inexpensively repair and calibrate them, even though they are long out of production. Parts are available. I bought one of Siglent's top of the line digital scopes a few years ago, just because I wanted to have one on hand with a much higher bandwidth, four channels, and an integral logic analyzer. From the start, its user interface was buggy and awkward. The controls are not well organized, nor are the on-screen menus. Doing firmware updates is a chore and it likely to hang up or even crash mid-upgrade. Siglent USA seems to only have one person to do everything, and I have found support practically nonexistent. The scope did not come with a manual, nor was one available from Siglent. When I chastised them for selling scopes with no available documentation on features and navigating menus, their response was that they can't be expected to cater to people ignorant about how scopes work! I still have it, but never use it, and only hold onto it because I don't want to hand its problems to some other unsuspecting person. My next scope, if there is one, will most likely come from Tektronix, and I will be happy to pay their price for the much better experience.
You had such an incredible customer support experience it's a little perplexing you purchased a Siglent. Surely you understood that level of support cost money. So was it just price that trumped your remarkable history?
@habcollector , no, I had a tax refund to spend, thought about getting a newer scope with an integrated logic analyzer. The tax refund would only buy a Siglent, and I thought it would be OK. I could not justify a Tek scope with similar features, as they were several times the cost, and I still planned for my Tek analog scopes to be my main ones. I did not expect the Tek level of service and support from Siglent, but I expected they would have at least a downloadable manual, and was horrified that nobody had bothered to even write one, not even online tutorials about the various features.
@@youtuuba Tek and Hp products are just better - period. But as an independent consultant I cannot afford that price point and 95% of the time they are good enough. For the other 5% I have friends with nice toys I can borrow. When I worked for companies I would always spec Tek, but on my bench (that I purchased new) is a collection of Rigol, Siglent and GwInstek products. I do have an old Hp desktop DMM, SigGen and Counter I got from eBay, back when eBay was a deal. There is a Tek MDO4034 I borrow at times when I have to, but other than that I do real work (not a hobbyist) and get paid for it. I would love a Tek or Hp of my own, but the price point the difference I cannot justify at my level of revenue. Yes there are better (in every way), but not the large price difference better. Thx for sharing your wonderful story it was a pleasure reading.
I've got a vacuum tube tek scope at home I use from time to time. The build quality inside is absolutely remarkable, made to be serviced as quickly and efficiently as possible
Me too, only gripe is that the calibration procedure is always "if you can't get it in spec by twiddling all the knobs, replace all the tubes". Very costly in 2022!
@@tmmtmm In all fairness, the fact the instrument has survived long enough to still be useful 50+ years down the line is still pretty impressive. I can't possibly see much of anything from 2022 surviving into 2072 for a service call
Owned some of the smaller 5 MHz b/w Tek tube scopes at one time. Not as bulky as their top models and the build quality inside was always worth marvelling at. They should have installed windows in their tube scopes so you could admire the insides.
Worthwhile mentioning probes. Your oscilloscope probe is often the front-end of your measurement system. Tektronix design their own probes, and they are expensive, for a good reason. The combination of a Tek probe and scope is a measurement system, and the combination will still meet bandwidth specification. Probe specification is often overlooked and the importance is under estimated. Be aware of what a bad probe can do to your measurement.
Tek probes are very good,electrically, low capacitance, small size, but they aren't very durable. The tip resistor capsule breaks and it costs $300+ dollars to replace them.
Anyone else remember Nicolet? Their scopes used to be built (and priced) like tanks, perfect for field service.Mine traveled the world with me and never gave a problem.
@@NeverTalkToCops1 Maybe not important to you, but I *like* knowing that the investment I'm making in production equipment for my new product can still get feasible upgrade support in another 10 years or so: If you're building something to sell, the quality of what you sell is closely related to the process control you have over the machines and systems that build it.
But when they first came to market there was no other manufacturer doing anything better. The scope Dave is showing right now although at Tek's lower end, it is nothing like the old low end Tek scopes. This scope also comes with not to bad warranty options such as repair or replace no questions asked like if you drop and brake the screen for example.
@@greglinder5784 "Feasible up grade support"? If you have a 10 Ghz bandwith oscilloscope do you expect an upgrade to 25 or 50 Ghz in 10 years will be available as an upgrade?
@@NeverTalkToCops1 some scopes it is a software limit so yes and buying the same scope in higher bandwidth and receiving the same UI / control logic is important in some lab situations
During my High School years I got my first introduction to test and measurement gear. First was the Tektronix 500 series scopes, then came more modern instruments like the Tektronix 465 and the TM 500 series mainframe instruments. I could almost pick out all the Tektronix gear that used as props in the television series "Battlestar Galactica". In the late 70's and early 80's I was fortunate to get tours of Tektronix and Fluke, it was an awesome experience. My dad had a friend who's wife worked at Tektronix and would get me component "roll ends". Now my home test and measurement lab is populated with gear I would of never guessed I would ever use let alone own. Instruments that were 10's of thousands of dollars can now be had for pennies on the dollar. Yes they may be old and obsolete but the quality used in their construction assures if properly maintained can last for decades.
A friend of mine worked for a Major Company, and called the reps for various mfrs to find out what they had that would meet a particular need. Tek asked: How many do you expect to need? Answer: A few thousand. Tek: Tell us what you want it to do and we'll build it. It became part of the standard line (or more likely, option package).
that is one THING the "big houses" can do and MAKE one off tools for one off jobs even snap-on will make custom tools for custom applications and price is dependant on how many YOU order / how sellable it is after they R/D it
I used LeCroy scope for years starting with their first in about 1980. Some cost over $48K. One was unreliable for years I finally wanted to send for repair but they denied coverage of any kind after 7 years. This cost $48K. I took it apart and found prototype PCBs with tinlead instead of gold connectors. They still would not support this. Did I remake their boards with tin lead? They offered me the cheapest obsolete 4 channel scope in trade. I got it and it was a tiny fraction of what I had in the original. I have never bought another Lecroy product. My lifetime purchases from them at that time was in excess of $250K. Not bad for one guy. I bought two Rhodies a while back and found them pretty good. Some silly limitations like averaging is on all channels or none instead individually. I have called support and talked to good folks. I got promised call back too. Lecroy is impossible to talk to. In the early years Lecroy was lightyears ahead of Tek and everyone else too bad I won't ever buy one again. I would entertain Tek or Agilent but probably not buy.
Mileage may vary. I own 2 used wr 6k and a wp7k and except of worn out knobs it was a way better experience than the tek tds 5k. Although Yokogawa dlm2054 beat both of them in power electronics staff.
Yea same experience with LeCroy, used to have lots of them in the lab, but their post sales and customer service are shite to say the least. We can do all the repairs in house, but they are just being beyond unreasonably unhelpful and mean. So we never bought another one from them again, mostly Tek instruments in the lab now.
Certainly Germany also has export control on some products and technologies... R&S does a LOT of 'government' business with 'agencies', who require very strict control on the export of the devices and technologies in use.
I’d love a list/review of the low end (sub ~2k$) scopes from the top brands. It’s not always easy to compare them, specially the details about the “extras” like digital analyzers, how easy is to script them from a computer,…
Many valid points but having worked in "high end" industries I have never seen a scope used for precise measurements. Lots of diagnosis, debugging and trouble shooting.. I also see lots of "high end" businesses feared into paying mega bucks for cal on equipment that just does not make sense. Sometimes yes, but for the most its a waste of time and money. Countless times I have needed to do a job but the gear is off for cal. It spends more time at cal than actual use.. Lets not forget that just because it was cal'ed today that it is accurate tomorrow. Experience and know how is key to confidence in a measurement, not a cal certificate. I have countless depressing stories regarding cal.
I agree most signals probed with scopes don't need high precision and traceability. It's a racket. If accuracy and precision is so important every scope would have to have at least a 12 bit ADC, when most have 8 bits. Logic signals values are dependent on their power rail voltages, the actual voltage of the signal doesn't require 1% accuracy. What really annoys me is very few scope models including medium to high end don't have a 10 MHz reference for the time base and sampling. Every reasonable signal generator does, arbitrary and RF. I run all my gear with a GPSDO, but none of my scopes have the necessary input.
That said, you are paying for lots of middle aged middle men justifing all of the above. If a business wanted to startup tomorrow ticking all those boxes and reducing cost via leanness, you could. It's only the establishment that stops it. Once a generation of people move on, the next generation rethinks the status quo. And if your country doesn't do it, another country will.
Keysight and TEK both CAN AND DO build "consumer" priced scopes in the 1K range with there "education" line and I bet they are higher performance scopes "down graded" to the spec as to be NOT TO GOOD of a value
Great video, lots of good information. I'm retired and only use test equipment for hobby stuff so Siglent it is. Mainly because the CFO/Wife won't approve the expenditure for better.
Some marketing person is probably thinking you missed the "brand dilution" reason. If you make a cheap version that is lower in quality for all the reasons you mentioned, now you can't claim that your brand is industry leading in terms of quality. This is the reason you have car companies (eg Toyota vs Lexus) that have different brands depending on the market they are targeting.
but they CAN and DO make a "cheap" scope in there "education" lines and do NOT talk about them beyond say they exist but BRAND "value" is very important to these companies AND consumers Toyota sells almost every LEXUS car as a Toyota NOT in America as Americans WONT pay Lexus pricing for a "Toyota"
foreign companies cannot "own" by technicalities the factory in China they have to have a majority stakeholder in China. They may run, watch over, test etc. with their own employees but in they do not own the factory or land, that is owned by China. Only a civilian can own their residence. Companies will say they "own" their own factories, in my line of work they claim that all the time and they actually fundamentally do not it has to be owned by a Chinese national or have ownership in the company structure. Why Tencent controls a minority stake in many gaming companies operating in China, Tencent owns the Chinese rights in China. Companies that say this BS really piss me off, the rules are simple, they do it to trick the gullible, why not say it correctly we have direct oversite and a qc team over a Chinese factory making products to our specification. Easy, simple and the truth. Ask any investor in the USA or elsewhere about property in Belize or any Petroleum company that had assets in Columbia. Or dare I say the R country for any country that want's to use any reason to take assets of R countries citizens. this has nothing to do with the quality and price of any equipment, many great things are made/assembled in China for obvious reasons (good or bad) this is just a critique on specific rights of ownership.
You know, I'm not sure it's a good idea to use the old saying: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". Since IBM didn't realize how hard competition became in the 90s and nearly went bankrupt because of their arrogance. Since then this old saying is actually outdated in my opinion.
We have seen this sort of pattern before, it happened with computers. Then the big pricey brands were restricted upwards while the bottom end was eaten up. Then the mid-range was destroyed when the realization struck that the value for money was terrible. And finally the top end fell when the rate of development accelerated on the mid to low end and most feature advantages were lost. My prediction, the high end of test equipment will experience more and increasing pressure from the low end. The cost of the high end will increase and the profit margins will drop. Eventually customers will question if they really need those high end guarantees and in most cases they will conclude that they do not. This will then leave a few ultra expensive options for those who truly need it.
even outside of test equipment there is a BIG shift of lower end getting "better value" but NOT "better" and the pro products getting even LESS affordable and eventually pricing themselves out of contention outside of the 1% that NEED the "better X" that they offer for multiples more money
I used to work in medical equipment manufacture. Test procedures were regularly audited by FDA since lives were on the line. You can bet that I would not incorporate any equipment that required me to rewrite a test procedure every year. Each rewrite costs thousands of dollars. Pay an extra $2k to avoid a yearly rewrite is a no-brainer
HOW MANY scopes does one person need ?!! I see all the scopes Dave has and feel nothing but jealousy because I still have an old TDS1000 from 20 years ago that struggles to do what I need 😂😂
Dude why is my comment sending me notifications about the glorious fake Mr Williams Ferguson? I know so many dudes that go by the plural name “Williams” lol lol
Nah, I invested with “Williams”… he thinks he is 6 different William’s… you know.. multiple personality disorder. He lost my entire life savings. His shrewd investor William personality gave everything to his gambling addict William personality, who lost everything….
What most people do not appreciate is that the cost of the test instrument can be a very small part of the overall cost in an end user T&M environment even if the cost an individual instrument is tens of thousands of dollars. Highly regulated environments such as military, medical, nuclear and others spend an enormous amount of money and time on verification and validation of test procedures and specialized test equipment to ensure that the end DUTs meet specifications. Traceable, reliable, high quality test equipment is vital for this and if, say, a particular model of oscilloscope cannot be used because it is no longer available, the cost in time and money to revalidate procedures for the new instrument can easily be an order of magnitude more expensive than the cost of the different test instrument. This is why many organizations will choose to keep using "obsolete" test equipment and even purchase it on the used market to keep their production lines working. edited for clarity
We have a lot of extremely expensive instruments at work, for several reasons: 1) Very high frequencies involved, and 2) Support - engineers from the provider actually visit occasionally, and we get calibration and things done (though salespeople also visit now and then, in order to get us to buy newer and even more expensive stuff), but no. 3) is also very important: however expensive a particular instrument is, say, $10k or $50k - that amount of money is quickly wasted if it stops us for some days because of a problem. So it's expensive, but it's more expensive if there are problems or shortcomings with something cheaper.
Dave, Reason #17: Measurement Stability. High-end scopes have guaranteed measurement across operating temperature range, usually -10 C to +60 C, that's due to careful individual component selection for temp drift and thermodynamic design of the case for sufficient cooling by heat sinks and fans. The same goes for magnetic shielding and electromagnetic interference, to insure consistent results.
Yep!
None of those features are proprietary to Tektronix.
@@NeverTalkToCops1 that’s not the point.
@@melgross The point is that all these and most of the features touted in the video are available for an order of magnitude less $ than the Big 4.
@@shazam6274 no, completely wrong. I have scopes going back to Hp. I also have Keysight. These cheap scopes are markedly inferior to those, as they are to the TEK scopes I’ve used. He really does explain it well in the video. Maybe you didn’t bother to watch it, or most of it. The cheap models are fine for lower end uses where consistency and adherence to standards and traceability aren’t important. But there’s no guarantee with these that every scope they sell will give the same results. There’s no guarantee that they will hold accuracy over a month, much less a year. If that’s ok for you, then go for it.
Thanks Dave! It is true that most hobbyists normally do not worry about "living within an ecosystem". But it is very important for professional use. Big T&M companies spend a lot of time and resources to ensure that a collection of their instruments play well together, offering something which is greater than the sum of individual parts.
Oh, forgot to add your link, will do that now!
hilarious how none of these channels - follow the basic rules on YT.
especially Signal path that is so lubricated to the moon and back by vendors and constantly concludes that the YT-rules don't apply for his channel - as he is special..
ua-cam.com/video/HWtOAWWY010/v-deo.html
Gone berserk the last 5 years and its a shame YT don't start to hand out strikes to channels that again and again.. are not willing to click the p4ld pr0m0tion boxi the pursue to get some transparency on these matter and the viewers have a channel to conclude what is influencer-4dv4rtising and what aint... gone berserk the last 5 years... not least from CN.
as a danish shareholder in alphabet inc... either you have rules or you dont.
@@hp2073 Just wondering if you have proof that Dave and TSP stand in queue to buy the Apple products.
HP is *great* for that.
As an aerospace EE I was able to use all of the brands of scopes. Rigol for lab prototyping, medium priced Tek or Agilent scopes for brassboard flight electronics development and test systems, and higher end scopes on one of a kind rad-hard spacecraft flight instruments that take years to develop and are worth $100mil or more (Hubble, Kepler, James Web, etc).
And...? Whats the Point of your post?
He touched them all in a naughty place...
@@SciMoTeAr and what exactly is the point of yours? You obviously don't understand the OP or you wouldn't be asking or your just trolling!
@@SciMoTeAr Just that we had the flexibility to use test equipment appropriate for the task, and not just all expensive Tek scopes for everything for example.
I looked at the question where someone asked "what the point of the post was". Thought for a minute and if remove the emotion out of that question it is not a bad question. You can ask yourself the question before you put anything out what the point is. By itself that is a good thing. As someone who read the post I found the information interesting and it added to the discussion. I'm slightly worried this will end up in some insult war but I can also see that comment can be viewed as insulting if you add emotion ot the equation. So what I'm curious to find out is that I cannot look into your heart and I wonder if it is possible to cut emotion out when you answer my question when I ask you a question. The question is that what information were you looking for when you asked them "What the point of the post was? " That really is a bit of a problem since this might have been a serious question which when I look at it without emotion is not a bad question but if you take what is normal in the environment I'm in could maybe be considered as a bit insulting and I wondered if that was your intention and you were curious. I think ultimately a lot conflicts including wars can be avoided since we assume someone's intention based on our own cultural background. One example in Japanese culture it is impolite to say No. So even if the answer is No it is possible that someone will say yes just because they don't want to offend . If you don't know this is a funny story if the importance of answer is low. However in some situations you really need to know and I'm not familiar with Japanese culture to tell you how that works and I would say within the culture it's likely not a problem but when they interact with other cultures it can become a problem. Also I mean no disrespect to other cultures the culture I am in has i'ts own oddities it's just that I'm used to deal with them so they are subjectively normal to me and probably objectively abnormal if I would spend more time thinking about them.
25-30 years ago as an import broker. Techtronix was one of my major clients. I'd bring in container loads of components for them. I had no idea their finished product was that expensive.
Back in the days of CRO (Cathode Ray Oscilloscope) analog scopes, Tek made some amazing scopes. They were regarded as the absolute best in business. Like the Tek 465B is in my opinion still one of the best scopes ever made. I have one that I just absolutely love to use.
@@SirMoyes, around the early DSO era tek really dropped the ball, their DSOs where TERRIBLE. having used these (the tds 220 to be specific) the screens especially are bad, even for the late 90s. its like drawing with a leaking pen.
Calibration and "Bankability" is a big deal; Even as a small startup, we worry about this kind of stuff: We needed a SourceMeter for a contract recently, and Tek (who now owns Keithley) still supports calibration on their 2420 SourceMeters- A product that has been out for ~25 years now. There are (cheaper) options available, but we're using the 2420 to validate performance of some new innovations in the PV industry, and the better and more trustworthy the data, the more likelihood we'll get of proving our product: It's not worth the time to justify cost savings of a kbuck or so if you're trying to test and validate things that scale into mass production. I appreciate the explanation of this, as it's something that catches people by surprise if they haven't ever thought about the reliability and accuracy of their measurements.
100% And when lives, even the safety of a nation depends on reliable and effective field engineering having a portable SA that let's you easily and reliably work on Microwave or VHF transmitters and radar is "mission critical" and Textronics delivered by real MilSpec gear that you could trust with your life and the others whom you serve. That's worth $100k for the SA, input mixers and probes and reference generators that they delivered to compliment the SA. And from that cheaper systems were developed that could serve a young telecom company. HP dominated for so long that it took a huge leap in tech to earn the trust of brand loyal engineers and techs. What's more their test equipment was good enough to use that a 19yo Sailor could learn it solidly in a few days of school. I lived to work with it on my radar gear.
@@radiotests What is an SA in this context?
@@mousethefoo1230 SA means Spectrum Analyzer
@@guessedUK Thank you!
Work story: we spent over $20k on a "high end" Rigol scope, diff probes, etc etc. Lo and behold, a couple months later and dozens of messages with their support and we still couldn't get a clean eye diagram from a BASE100T signal (measured on multiple examples including an FPGA signal emulator). They kept on pushing a "solve the measurement problem" type solution rather than giving us any sort of specifications on noise floor or accepting the unit as defective. As soon as we started discussing refunds the service and customer manegement personal ghosted us. We ended up paying our own shipping and returning the equipment, and making a chargeback against the purchase with no responses from them at all.
Maybe they're okay for hobbiests just trying to get something for their Arduino projects, but for any serious work they shouldn't even be looked at.
Know exactly where you are coming from here, I once spent 2 days trying to figure out why a trace wasn't right on my Rigol scope only to eventually realise it was a firmware issue. This is why at work they spend the extra money on Keysight so they aren't paying for engineers to waste time fault finding the instrument. For my own projects the Rigol is fine because although frustrating it isn't a huge problem when I hit problems but at work that can end up costing thousands in wasted time or rework. If money was no object I would have a Keysight at home in a heartbeat.
Hi. I understand your frustration but I must say that if I want to make very tricky measures like you did, I would go for a higher end mfr. The lower end oscilloscopes are either for retail consumers who cannot afford a costy thoroughly designed equipment or for very generic measurements like simple analog or digital inspections but surely not for qualifications, certifications of protocols like Ethernet, USB, Displayport, DDR, etc... if you have offices full of willing HW engineers, many working on different projects and different aspects of their designs may want to do series of measures at the very same time and cannot afford to wait for one of the 4 submitted to schedule cutting edge MSO, most of all for a simple clock frequency, an I2C bus analysis, a 1kHz PWM duty cycle evaluation, Arduino projects debugging or an audio signal. That is where you Rigol or Siglent made material intervenes.
did you also get the same problem with siglent?
Sorry, I don't work on the high end, I bring an oscilliscope to work (rather dirty field environment, in almost every way imaginable) for the really nasty troubleshooting, all of my other techs are rather impressed, many hardly ever heard of such equipment. all under 10Mhz, no need to lug, and likely break a $2000+ tool when a $300 one will do.
for the rare, occasional work that demands such, I rent them.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly do see a need for expensive equipment, just not usually in my area of expertise.
If and when it becomes necessary to purchase such, I will happily do so however.
Even for home/hobbyist use I don’t recommend Rigol any longer. I made the mistake years ago with one the worst function/arbitrary waveform generator I ever had the misfortune to use. It won’t output a correct amplitude when doing AM modulation for example if you turn off and on the modulation the carrier amplitude would increase and etc. It wasn’t a defective unit, as returned and second one did exact same thing. They never fixed it in firmware in at least the couple years had it before cutting losses and selling it. I ended up replacing it with a Tektronix afg3102 and that one works as expected.
Then the Rigol RF signal generator was junk as well and would freeze up at random and then started to have very poor modulation quality all the sudden. Then the lack of support. I ended up replacing it with a couple older HP RF signal generators a 1 GHz and a 3.2 GHz that much older and had to repair the 1 GHz one as brought broken with a shorted mosfet in PSU due to failed Rifa capacitor, but was NOS never used and way better then the sorry Rigol crap.
Love my hobbiest Rigol that this very channel helped in the purchase. Thanks, Dave! ❤️
I guess you also modded it if DS1054?
@@jarinaumanen8447 maybe 😉
Lucidly argued, Dave. Outstanding. So many people blinded by how good cheaper kit can be overlook the simple fact that major govmt contracts require auditing a manufacturer's supply chain for compliance - this was one of the big points that stood out for me.
There was a time in my life i would only consider Tek or Hp. Then I started my consulting business and now I buy Rigol and Siglent. Tek and Hp better in just about every category but its not the price difference better. Rigol not better but usually good enough. There are times i need the Tek so I borrow it. Nice to have friends with toys.
I also have to wonder about the trickle down argument from high end manufacturers into their own low end scopes. These days it feels more like the adaption from the low end segment forces the larger manufacturers to include (often easy aka software) features in their lower end models, not because they may have pioneered them. I mean in about every industry you try to (atrificially) keep the status of your high end segment up for as long as possible, despite tech advances having made it easily feasible to include them in low end devices. If anything, measuring gear is one of the few industries that still get away with selling already present hardware capability via software upgrades for ludicrous prices. So I will keep cheering for the low end manfacturers, because they are the only ones that apply at least some pressure to that industry; maybe Fluke will one day ship DMMs with decent test leads again this way.
@@ignispurgatorius5297 The high end manufactures do feel pressure of an ever decreasing customer base. And may one day have to adapt or die. At this point I figure I will never afford an hp and I think they are many people like me. So where as once upon a time you just glanced at the low end market now you stay locked in on it. I went to school on Hp Tek and Fluke yet the first multi meter I bought for my daughter was a uni t. Her first scope likely a Siglent. She won’t grow up in the world I did and I wonder if Tek and hp recognize that.
@@EfieldHfield_377 does NOT matter what "industry" you are in there is an ever growing divide between "consumer" and TRADE" tools and in MY opinion it is getting WORSE and FLUKE / TEK and "friends" are MOVING MORE EXPENSIVE and "away" from home consumer markets
they "have" to offer the $1k "education" units to have the next generation using there products and there work flows and to "indoctrinate" students into the "professional" brands
for 80% of shops a top spec "hobbyist" brand is a better tool then a LOWER tier "professional" brand
@@jasonriddell Their business model will have to change. What they called hobby are a lot of seasoned engineers like myself doing real work for real money. The young people I mentor I use Siglent Rigol GW and BK and that’s my general preferred order. With the exception of hand held DMM I don’t buy outside of those brands.
I would guess any brand that has sensible calibration prices and accessory compatibility should be pretty good. Of course, when you have big enough house, you want to standardize everything and then longetivity of product may be the most important factor.
As someone who uses scopes that cost 3-5x what that 2 series do, it's about measurement stability, the ecosystem of accessories (I have a number of odd and special purpose probes with excellent integration), and the support you get from an established company (I have a high level tech at Agilent's personal cell number).
For motor controls development and dynamometer setups where higher accuracy, a lot of channels and long term logging is important there are other companies like Yokogawa that makes the scopecorder which have very useful specialized features. No affiliation with them just a big fan and wanted to mention another expensive name in the biz that has a lot of good reasons which weren't mentioned to charge as much as they do
a "specialized" device for a "small" sub segment is ANOTHER reason the "professional" brands are "worth" more then "consumer" brands the scopecorder sells in VERY small number I imagine like the super high bandwidth Tek scopes and in some cases those companies will make/modify custom equipment for ONE customer
@@jasonriddell I'm confused. Are you agreeing or being sarcastic, you have way too many "quotes" in that comment
When there exists equipment with features that save a lot of engineering time and are able to do so reliably it's worth a lot of money.
The scope corder has features like high resolution and high frequency sampling with modularity for a huge variety of channel types which makes a lot of sense for some things. They're also not actually that expensive compared to the 5 series Tek scopes for example
I love my 50 year old 60 MHz Tek analog scope. It's as good as the day it was made, just the thing for debugging Arduino and ESP32-based projects. Tek rocks!
Likewise, I love my 30 year old, 400 MHz TEK 2465B.
@@johncasteel1780 WANT ;-)
Same as with Fluke, Keithley, HP, Agilent etc. It's a well recognized real deal pro gear name across the whole electronics industry in the world. Tektronix has always been a very high quality brand. They haven't been popular here in Poland because they were so expensive and Western (remember the Iron Curtain? we could do with our own, Soviet, GDR, Czechoslovak etc. gear, none of that capitalist rubbish! haha) so there's very little vintage Tek gear running around, and if something pops up, it can run into thousands. Definitely not for my teeny tiny budget. Personally, I've only got a 410 physiological monitor in my collection; it's extremely well built, gold-plated PCB, well thought out assembly, touchy feely controls, just sweeeeeet! A thing of beauty and a joy for ever.
BTW I had a '70s Polish knockoff-of-a-Tek all tube scope model OS-102, loved that stuff, it was beautifully built, but in no way it compared to the original. Geez, I wish I hadn't sold it... would love to have it in my lab now. Or a Tek for that matter.
As a Lecroy Guy (Education, First 2 Companies I was working in) my workflow was really trimmed down to their specific UI. In the new company we decided to buy some new scopes and compared (and tested) similar scopes from the big 4. They all offer more or less the same bang for the buck. Having 6 devs favoring Tek against 2 favoring Lecroy made the decision quite easy. Long story short, the homelab market isn’t worth competing (to much competition in this segment) but edu really is the big deal.
Sensible words Sir.
I bought a very basic Tek TDS1002 (50Mhz 1Gs) scope a little over 20 years ago.
In the time I have had/used it, two faults occurred and both rectified.
The first to appear was the self-launching power button that always caused the button to disappear under the bench for a few days. A spot of high-strength epoxy sorted THAT one.
After a few years of use the second was a curious intermittent reset of the scope every once in a while - mostly when the scope was being used to monitor vehicle stuff and therefore moving about all the time. I investigated and found the EURO mains power socket was a VERY crappy design that was not electrically coherent all the time. File, big ass soldering iron and lots of solder later - fixed forever.
This scope has performed perfectly up to its limitations for me in respect of measurement and diagnostic tool in all the time I have had it.
Yes, I have an OWON w/battery. Great concept - not finished. MAJOR generic problem with the rotary encoders for gain and time-base. SUPER flaky. I have seen other china-origin scopes with the same problem. Part of the problem seems to be the clumsy way the panel multiplex is done. Very crappy signaling. But the encoders are ALSO most certainly physically defective components. A big shame in my view.
Otherwise, OWON has slotted themselves into a nice niche in the low-end scope market.
Received your 'winner' response. I do not have a bat phone - or a Crocodile Dundee knife. [ Not fussed with merch mate ]. Keep on truckin' chap.
I will probably stick with Keysight scopes for a long time, as it's what I was trained on and worked with and I am very familiar with them.. But I gotta say I am also starting to warm up to R&S scopes. 🥰
I worked Test Stations and Fixtures in a Manufacturing Environment. We where able to understand each product failure mode regardless of product
Keysight has very intuitive menus as well.
I went to an auction for my cities school district and bid on some Tek gear. I won and am now the proud owner of a 570 tube curve tracer and a 555 . I got them home and started to look them over and the 555 is the same one that I used in Mr. Bihar's class in 1971! Some clown had carved his name on the side of it and it was on this one. I checked it over and powered it up (current limited) and she came to life like it was 50 years ago. THAT is why Tektronix is so expensive. My dad was a radar engineer at GE and he told to always buy HP test gear at government surplus sales because they never got used because all the techs wanted to use the Tektronix gear so the other stuff just sat there unused.
This was really important for me when I was doing research for my thesis. I was gathering data on the stability of oscillators for time keeping purposes to determine what sort of reliability could be expected for a particular device. When you're measuring error though, the first question you're going to get asked is "How can you be sure that the error is in the device under test and not your test equipment?". If I had used a scope from eBay, I would have had to have done a lot of extra work to try and have a convincing answer to that question, and it would likely be really challenging to defend. However as I had invested in higher end scope, I was simply able to present the certificate of calibration, making this a complete non-issue.
Granted not everyone cares about that stuff, but when you do, you *really* do.
alternatively you have to "prove" to your client that you can REPEAT the results and that likely would pre require a validation sequence of the "ebay" scopes likely more then one and the savings would be eaten up on the pre validation / buying redundant units to cross check with ETC
I was using Tektronix 555 scopes in the 70s. Also more modern ones during my 40 years in the job including TDR for def antenna systems.
My early career in radio & electronic spoiled me. I was in the Military and then Broadcasting. Everything was Tek, Fluke, HP, Racal and Rhode & Schwartz.
We had a 10Ghz Tektronix scope at my old job. It was over six figures to purchase.
Measurements you can trust, accurate measurement even after years of usage without calibration.
Been using one for over 12 years.
How do you know its accurate?
I don't deal with this stuff so it might be very different, but in my dealings, mostly with computers, software and networking I have noticed more and more recently that support might as well be nonexistent. Also confidence has been very much eroded away with the big major enterprise companies having huge problems with bugs and security holes, like Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, and more. Given that I have seen this consistent across many industries even outside of what I mentioned above I have to question here how much of this is currently the case vs just people and companies relying on the history. Maybe this area hasn't been hit with this, or maybe it has. In any case the point is that in my experience relying on a company's past actions and products as an indicator of current quality of products and support is often misguided.
Dell, Microsoft, and to a lesser degree Cisco are in a very different situation than companies like Tektronix. They're huge companies and they offer high-end stuff, but the companies as a whole don't rely on the high end market. Unless you're buying tens of millions of dollars worth of their product, they don't notice you exist.
A better comparison would be companies like Stratus and NetApp. They deal with low volume enterprise-level products as their main source of revenue. Customer relations is vital to them because their sales are driven by their reputation. Their products are expensive enough that it's worth it to them to send a representative to your office to try to convince you to buy them, and it's worth it to them to keep the IT folks happy.
@@jeffspaulding9834 I have dealt with far more than Dell Microsoft and Cisco. I have dealt with small companies, medium companies and big companies and the consistent things that I have observed are that you either spend so much money that it is in no way worth it, like you could easily run some open source software yourself and hire dedicated staff to manage it for less, or you get support that is so bad it might as well not exist, or even be better if it didn't.
@@jeffreyparker9396 That's assuming you can get qualified personnel to work the open source software. NetAPP is a good example of this - it does nothing that you couldn't do with a couple FreeBSD boxes and a few disk arrays, but IT staff have to have a deep understanding of clustered redundancy, ZFS, iSCSI/MPIO, and basic UNIX administration in order to pull it off. Whereas NetAPP customer support will call you and tell you that you have a drive failing and the replacement is already in the mail.
When you consider how much you have to pay for that expertise, the price NetAPP charges doesn't seem so bad.
@@jeffspaulding9834 I have not had a problem finding qualified personnel. It is also not too crazy to learn, I learned enough of that stuff in a couple of weeks pretty easily. I haven't dealt with NetApp, but I have dealt with EMC and their support that was supposed to do the same thing, but it took far longer to fix it to work as they wanted before they would come out to fix a problem then it would have taken to just setup a newer storage system and therefore would have saved quite a bit of money.
To really compare I would have to know the cost of NetApp, but from what I have seen, the cost is still far in favor of building your own, running something like truenas.
@@jeffreyparker9396 We do have problems finding qualified personnel, and even more problems justifying them.
Windows admins are a dime a dozen. That's what we get, because 99% of our system is Mickeysoft-based. Most of them wouldn't know iSCSI from a roast beef sandwich and think fiber channel is part of the Discovery network. So we'd need at least two people knowledgeable enough to build and maintain these systems (because you know one will always be on vacation when something happens).
The service contract for NetAPP is significantly less than the salary of even one of these guys. So whenever something happens, we find the Windows admin who's eaten the least paste and have NetAPP support walk him or her step-by-step through swapping out a drive or a controller.
The only time any of us has to understand the thing is when we're doing the initial design and setup. That's usually me. It's worth their while to pay me to design and set it up, but I'm expensive so they have much better use for my time than babysitting storage appliances.
Maybe companies that are willing to pay for more experienced IT folk don't have that problem. We do, and I know we're not the only ones.
(Just to be clear - I know there are good Windows admins out there. But there's a lot of bad ones out there, and they're cheap. Troubleshoot-by-Google works for most of our problems so it's not as bad as it seems.)
Well, just to leave my thoughts here, this is absolutely the reason I will only get (used) high tier scopes:
I have a Tektronix 453A scope (very very old stuff for sure, but I use it mostly for audio and vintage repair). Now I fished it out of a cellar where it was stored for at least 10 years, a dank dusty dirty cellar. When I got it we measured it... and it was bang on cal, perfectly in spec except the inverting amplifier on ch2 everything else was working perfectly on a scope that was manufactured 50 years ago and spend 10 years stuck in a moist dirty abandoned cellar. Now I don't know about your rigol or hantek scope... but will it do that?
Clear story. Clear difference between professional and hobby usage. As the words say it, if used for professional purposes one needs to trust the measurement, as the company would cost actually more if they use the buggy low end equipment. Companies make many using the high end equipment and one part of the price is based on that. For a hobby use a whole different story.
In the old days, most manufacturers had the small components soldered to terminals on phenolic terminal strips. But Tektronix components were soldered to silver inserts embedded in ceramic strips. And you were advised, when making a repair, to use silver bearing solder. Regular solder would, allegedly, cause the bond between the insert and the ceramic to weaken. Tektronix did, sort of, have a line of "economy" scopes. They became the distributor for the British company, Telequipment. Telequipment scopes were pretty decent (I have one, a D54, and like it). Those scopes, for instance, employed fiberglass PC boards, not the phenolic ones that were more common.
Now that's a name from the dim and distant past - Telequipment. I used to use Telequipment scopes and yes they were ok, but when all was said and done for me it was a "Real" Tek scope every time. I recently bought a Tek 475 for very general low end electronic work. Still works and to my knowledge may still have many if not all the original components !!!!!!!!.
@@brucepickess8097 That's a coincidence! At this very moment, I'm buying a Tek 475A, off of Ebay. Back in the 80s, I used a 465 at work. So I know I'll like the 475A, 'cause it's a little better. My other scope is an NLS MS-215, which I paid WAY too much for. Why? Because when they first came out in the late 70s (the 15, 215, and 230), I just HAD to have one, because they were so cute. And it DOES run circles around those cheapie, palm-sized, Chinese wonders (I actually bought one of those, not for the scope, but because it was also an RCL meter/component tester).
@@brucepickess8097 "Good and bad," regarding scopes, must be judged according to the time period. Back then, any scope with triggered sweep was a "lab grade" scope, beyond the means of hobbiests, technicians, and small repair shops. Universities and R&D labs had them, but we peasants had to make do with recurrent sweep models, which, as often as not, had AC only coupling.
Yep, We had Telequipment scopes at my college, two channel. They were excellent.
Higher brands had more software support for automated messering systems.
And most of them had "low" price solutions or brands, so Rhode und Schwarz had Hameg. My first was a Hameg and it is running fine more than 40years later.
The old Lecroy Waverunner Xi and Wavesurfer Xs scopes had already a VISA mount on the back.
I have to agree about the low end. Just over a decade ago, I bought an Agilent DSO1024A. It looked essentially identical to one that Rigol was making at the time. The scope has been pretty good from an operating standpoint, but the firmware/user interface is crap. From the buttons and knobs not responding quickly or giving "double taps" when pressed, to the overall feel and menu structure on the buttons. I have never checked to see if they updated the firmware for the scope to improve it. Maybe I should.
When schools decide to upgrade a labful of test gear, you will see stuff like pallet loads of nice identical scopes etc. and often get them at steal prices. A boon for the average bloke with small budget.
have seen many a LAB upgrade and sell off in bulk there "old" equipment often tied to a major upgrade to the products they make and there are companies that buy these and refurbish them to sell to "home/mom and POP" shops and have seen "top 4" brands for RIGOL pricing and I would "trust" a used PRO scope over a low cost "consumer" scope
I bought used TDS1002 on eBay and I'm quite happy with it despite LCDs on those models are terrible
Nailed it. Things like Isoview probes are not available from anyone but Tek...and 200MHz HV diff probes
Every Engineer I've talked to hates the interface for the 5 & 6 series Tektronix Oscilloscopes. Operating it with one hand while probing a board is a nightmare. For that reason, I've seen more & more switch back to the DPO & MDO series.
The real reason: It's the "Cool" factor. Tektronix has a history of making the coolest CRTs. The "Cool" factor stay associated with the Tektronix name.
I worked at IBM back in the 80's. IBM had the coolest most expensive mainframe Tektronix oscilloscopes money could buy. IBM wanted their employees to feel like they were in a highly scientific environment.
This reminds me that I worked many years with a Tektronix 465... Now at home I have a low end Siglent...
I have used all sorts of brands of scopes. I grew up on Tek and currently own HP/Agilent. I've used Siglent, Rigol and also own an OWON scope.
There is no comparison between the big-names and budget scopes. For a given scope across MFRs that seem to have "same specs" -- the big name scopes are going to have overall better products in some intangible way besides just costing more.
My OWON Tablet scope is new to me, but built on technology that's a few years old. While my 1990's vintage HP54601 is a green-screen is over 30yrs old, the scope is overall faster. The OWON *looks* better (being color) -- but it's demonstably SLOWER in terms of display rate than the HP. The regular mode is faster, the XY mode is LOADS faster. The scope measurements are faster.
My 3yr old OWOn can't even hold a candle to my 20yr old Agilent MSO6054A in terms of display rate and decode speed. The MSO decodes SPI and I2C and other protocols at line speed. The OWON can't even keep up.
The OWON is my "junky disposable" high end "portable DMM with scope display" while my Agilent MSO is my "drill into designs to find what's wrong" scope.
And yea -- HP/Agilent/Keysight support is *AMAZING*.
Why are Tek scopes so expensive. Lets start with a CEO and Board of Director cronies along with endless VP's and never ending layers of uneeded intermediate management that all make zillions of dollars off the backs of hard working underpaid Engineers. Forget the salaries, the money from no cost instant vesting stock options, the perks for any "expense", the lavish offices, private jet transport, limos, the hordes of entourage that supports them in the office and follows them everywhere. I worked in Silicon valley for 45 years as a Hardware Engineer thru Director, trust me on this, its fat at the top, real fat.
What oscilloscope do you recommend currently in the 500 dollar price range?
My Tektronix 935A was less than £100. Still works fine.
I have a Tek scope from the 90s that has a 3.5" floppy drive and it takes 30 seconds to write a 100kB file for a trace. In 2010 or so, I got a Tek Scope with a USB drive. Guess what, it takes the same amount of time to write to the USB memory. They obviously did not put anymore effort in other than the drive interface, the backend to the drive was the same slow speed. And these are not cheap scopes.
my 90's era Hitachi scope takes that long to save a trace also to a 3 1/2 floppy
Love your channel mate
Thanks for this video. Actually, if I may, I will weep for some Tektronix very expensive equipment. There are MSOs like Series 5 or 6 that can easily reach k£20+ according to the options you select on them amongst which you can buy for the DDR protocol certification. So you are happy because you find oscilloscopes with at least 4GHz and 10+ GSps but the issue is that they have their logic probes TLP058 with a stupid 500MHz bandwidth and no other higher bandwidth logic probes in their catalogue. This is very frustrating! For one of my projects in the industry, I needed to qualify a 2133MTS DDR3, that is, based on a 1,066MHz clock. These Series 5 or 6 MSOs looked perfect with their up to 64 digital channels. Actually, I am still on it but I changed mfr. Anyone has managed to test DDRs with Tektronix equipments especially for many digital signals at the same time?
@EEVblog Hey Dave! What's your take on rebranded equipment? I see quite many LeCroy-branded equipment (including scopes) which in fact are Siglent under the hood. And there's a significant price difference between the same products depening on what badge is slapped on them.
In my experience LeCroy have patchy quality so if paying top dollar best avoided.
real question is at a "true" rebadge OR is the LeCroy better/different IE made by Siglent WITH Teledyne patented tech inside NOT available in the Siglent units
I do NOT know but that MIGHT be the "answer"
Tektronix, Keysight,...reliable? I don't think so. The TDS520, TDS540 A series with their failing capacitors. The MSO series with their failing encoders which are very expensive to replace while the encoders are just low cost plastic junk. The software bugs inn the MSO series which they like to call features (no they are not). The MSO40xx with its booting problems. The Keysight encoders on function generators and scopes which are again expensive to replace and fail after 4...5 years. The Tek THS720 with its very expensive battery pack which fails after a few years because they overcharge the battery. The TDS50xx series with their failing power supplies and failing encoders after about 8 years of non extensive use. Tektronix (Keithley) equipment full of software bugs. A DMM with data-logging capability is useless if you return to the lab and find your DMM stuck in a BOD.
What happened to Rohde & Schwartz oscs downunder?
Tektronics support, as with other serious name brands is excellent.
I need to start buying from tektronics for new equipment. Right now we use fluke for everything and they have the worst customer service
Even in Uni in the mid 80s all scopes were Textronix and anything more sophisticated would have been Hewlett Packard.
for me it was All HP and NO TEKTRONIX and at grad I could buy HP equipment for personal use like 50 to 75% off a once in a lifetime deal right from HP Agilent
" Never Assume " ;)
Guessing the bean counters have done this , but that is also where some issue's [ at least I see , that does not mean mch ] .
But what I am gathering is creeping into society in general is " race to the bottom " at every level .
So having a 2nd tier of gear , maybe even with another / new brand name , example Snap-On - Blue Point ?
leave out many of the options , support ect. to partially lower the price for hobby etc.
And if & when someone is ready to upgrade their bench , they have a known connection to go to .
Consumer products , and labor level tools have taken over ---- and also seems to have affected general populace mind-set ?
Servicing the average consumer - this is an on-going struggle / argument , that is recognised by older generations --- TV's , refrigerators & appliances in general used to last 20 yrs. - were not replaced because they failed , but were replaced to upgrade .
Now those same devices are replaced 3 , 5 maybe at most 8 yrs.
Let alone the marketing game buy every new model - keep up with the Jones ;)
Just some thoughts ?
I get the price of Fluke meters, but the fact that I see very few Tektronics scopes in labs anymore says something… When I started in this feild every bench had a Tek….
They made a couple of scopes with user interfaces that where very, very, very slow. Cheap garbage sold for premium prices. Not sure how their latest equipement is but I don't even care to try.
@@outsideworld76 have heard a LOT of "bad" things with the early LCD TEK scopes an through to newer stuff and being "over priced" compared to likes or R&S and Keysight units
@@jasonriddell The TDS3000 series was great for it's time but also insanely price compared to nowadays scopes. I had to repair one of those units and was shocked about the poor quality of the soldering. It was a €7500,- scope from the early 2000's. Made in the USA. I guess they didn't offshore the production only for reasons of cost, also finding good employees to run the production lines was problematic.
Do those cheap scopes have persistence functions that actually work? Otherwise aliasing could be a constant problem.
I play around with 60's/70's home audio and 80's 8 bit computers, a Tektronix scope would be overkill for these. LOL.
Is there a way of replacing the B&W lcd in the TDS1012B to a color one?
The audio appears to be slightly out of sync with the video.
All very nice but of no interest to a hobbyist or a retired person like me that wants to stay in electronics. I saw a Rigol osciloscope on Amazon for $3000 and I can't remember if it had 500 MHz or 1 GHz bandwidth and it had a 16 channel logic analyzer feature. I would be more interested if you could (or perhaps you already have?) evaluate the more expensive test equipment from Siglent, Rigol etc. Because I would never buy the ultra expensive test equipment from Keysight, Textronics etc. But I am willing to spend extra on some of the cheaper brands if they are worth it.
Err, yeah, I literally said these reasons might not apply to you. I have two new Rigol scopes coming.
@@EEVblog Oh good, Amazon seems to have this one: RIGOL MSO5354 350 MHz Mixed Signal Oscilloscope with 4 Analog Channels and UltraVision II. Is this one any good, do you have a review for it?
@@EEVblog "NICE RIGOLS? or more VALUE minded units
I would like to see the for them TOP tier scope and how far (if any) behind it is to a "top tier" scope
Are Tektronix scopes more expensive than R&S, Agilent, Rigol etc?
I swear all the youngish people like me seem to be using second hand scopes from the late 80s still. I dream of having an on screen display. 😂😂
Huh, I dream of having an illuminated grid, and being able to see the trace in normal daylight !!!!!!😏
@@brucepickess8097 very much so. 🤣
6:56 What kind of stuff would China put into devices if they own it? Could you make examples in an extra video???
we have tektronix MSO 2024 Oscilloscope very expensive one for us, after three years problem started at first it is not booting so we send it to tektronics Bangalore ,after inspecting they said it is not serviceable and return it back to us, when i turned on its booting but no input signal on all channel, now our policy is no more than 1200$ for Oscilloscope , and tektronics is big NO
Because the price is always set by the highest bidder. You are not the highest bidder.
Right before I left the company we were deciding between two $750,000 prototype scopes from Keysight and Tek. Absolutely amazing bandwidth and features. The probes cost more than some cars. The scope seemed offended if anyone with less than a Nobel prize touched it.
Same here, we were deciding to get a 12ch tek scope to do flash characterization in our Flash controller chip. I think it costs almost a mil or something. Crazy!! But those high end scopes look and feel sooooo nice. Remote control with UI is a biggg plus
At my previous job we had a €150.000 oscilloscope that went up to 6GHz. It's nuts, I literally could capture an entire Wi-Fi 2.4GHz packet and scroll through it, looking at the phase shifts. One day I had to repair one of the probes. With a soldering iron. Because I've got a steady hand and someone broke the thing..
I actually loved using that thing. I
PC - Load PHd certificate.
@@mrstijntje lol we bought a used 6 ghz scope on eBay I think the thing runs windows. What a beast.
What's that? A Fields medal? Get out of here!
- High end Keysight scope, probably
Yeah! Having test equipment that lasts a long time and has long term is very important. We got some new test equipment in just a month ago. Luckily all the SCPI commands are the same between the models with just a few more additional ones. We only had to change a few lines in our test code for the new equipment. (the test automation code is over 22k lines, if we run all tests it can take 18 hours to run!). So if the new equipment didn't support the old functinality......that would really suck! One test procedure (around 600 pages long) takes me a week to get through, but automated it takes 47 minutes! I would hate to have to interface to a new piece of test gear and have to rework all of that!.
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Keep in mind that Tektronix, Keysight (formerly Agilent, formerly Hewlett-Packard) and other large T&M players PAID for the development of the SCPI control standard. They funded the SCPI Consortium and sent staff to sit in the committee meetings and work out the common commands and protocols for each class of instruments. I still have the original spiral-bound volumes that came out of that process. Unlike the platform-and vendor-specific instrument drivers you get in LabVIEW or whatever, you can use SCPI commands in whatever language or test environment you choose, and another qualified test engineer will be able to read and understand what you've done.
Former Tektronix engineer here: Don't think you mentioned traceability of the measurement. All measurements are traceable to a national standard and again to the definition of the measurement. This way a customer can pass the traceable measurement along in their products. This is a must for many companies. For example when Analog produces a datasheet for its amplifiers, or a fiber optic company documents the performance of the just laid transpacific fiber, or NASA qualifies a new satellite.
Dave mentioned traceability at least four times.
Thanks for the video! I bought a Siglent last winter and had a very pleasent experience operating it. When I encountered a "bug", and filed a report, I got response, with in a week. Following that I got a call from a very friendly support engineer requesting input on how to reproduce the problem. In german from their offices here, no Indian outsourced call center BS. I'd count that as "they take my request seriously", unlike some big software companies which tent to open a bug ticket with no solution until the universe heat death. Since I'm not a professional EE, I found the effort Siglent put into my problem solving very commendable. Heck a mail answer with "this is not an intented use case!" would have sufficed in my opinion. While talking to the guy on the phone he said that, Siglent wants to push upwards in the markets, and therefore intents to perform as well. I'm glad I spend the 1400 bucks on that scope and addons, rather than a "top tier" one, with half the features, but with services I do not need in a hobby environment.
I've only bought siglent bench DMMs, and of the 3 I bought, 2 would randomly lock up after a few hours of use. tech support was good and all, but that's the last siglent measurement product I'll ever buy
@@youchooby What model Siglent DMM was that?
Totally agree with the Tek scopes being written in to procedures. I worked in the nuclear medicine field long time ago and gave factory support to branch offices supporting hospitals. If I came across a scope not being able to measure what was required, it would be very painful for the branch office. Because now the issue shifted from "your equipment is a pain to repair" to "why are you wasting everybody's time if you can't even show up with the right tools at the job?" And it did happen, occasionally because the scopes required where top of the range Tek scopes and most other medical equipment did not require exactly that. We would still help them, fly out with our own scope, etc. But the local office would get a very therapeutic bill for the effort.
BTW, there is an (oddball) mid tier brand I like very much, called Picoscope. They have some very interesting products, sometimes with application focused specifications, for instance automotive or low frequency analog or embedded applications. I like this brand because it is accessible to the hobbyist but still caters to the needs of the professional market. It could be nice to have a video about this brand.
Love Picoscope. I got to use them at 6th Form College (ages 17/18 to people outside the UK). I've only ever used their entry-level USB scopes (2200 series IIRC), but they're very reasonably priced for the hobbyist and offer enough to get started with. Also being USB it's very portable and insanely useful being able to take direct screenshots and the UI is very intuitive. Also has serial decoding for pretty much any interface you care to throw a stick at.
This is in no way sponsored but if you're a hobbyist with ~£100 to drop on a scope you could do a lot worse in my opinion, and that's from about 5 years of using them throughout A-Levels and Uni studies... Unless you're big into your RF or FPGAs, there's not much even the basic one can't do well enough.
@@adzib1823 I agree with you. To add to that, I was recently on their website. (I am actually thinking of buying their 16Bit 5MHz scope, exactly to use for audio amplifier projects.) I have noticed that due to component shortages, they are reducing their portfolio. And as you can imagine, the low end products suffer. That is logic because if you are limited by a chip you can buy, you want to make it count. So if you want to buy one and your favorite model is available, buy it now before that model is put on hold.
@@hugobloemers4425 Ah the chip shortage... Having just finished an internship with an electronics design consultancy firm, I now appreciate how much of an absolute nightmare it is. What you're saying wrt. the low end taking a hit makes sense - higher end gear is objectively more useful and also (usually) would command higher profit margins. It makes sense from a business point of view.
I like you think that Pico Scopes are excellent. I purchased a two channel 12 bit 256 MSa/sec, 4227 well over ten years ago and it is still going strong unlike my eight year old Tektronix MDO3024 which is dead and uneconomic to reapair. The triggering is great, noise is pretty low and the software is easy as to use.Serial decode comes with the software so you don't have to fork out money for every option. I seriously considered purchasing one of their high end systems to replace my busted MDO3024 and it was a close call between an R & S 2004 and the Pico Scope. I think Dave should do a review on a middle of the range one as they are very good.
They also make some very nice probes.
Warranty? Does it offer life-time warranty for free? No, it doesn't, you pay big bucks year after year if you want a warranty.
High quality components? Does the 10k+ USD Tektronix new scopes come with mini-LED HDR screen like on an Apple computer?
Made in USA means better quality? Do you really believe so or have you been fed by all the China-hating propaganda for so long that you cannot tell right from wrong. Just look at your lab equipments, dare you tell us how many of them are made in USA? So you're saying only "high-end" tektronix equipments are made in USA? Does Tektronix MSO 5 Series and 2400 series SMU qualify as "high-end", which by the way are all made in China? Or, you mean only those priced 100k+ USD equipments qualify as "high-end"?
"Bottom of the barrel whoever can assemble them the cheapest in China." So much prejudice in your words just lower your credibility. You probably still think it's 1980s now. Wake up, Japan and Germany, probably two of the "best" countries in your opinions have been fabricating quality control reports for decades, and re-brand Chinese made products as "Japanese" quality.
"Application support"? Really? Do do have any idea how much the application options cost in Tektronix scopes? Well, for example, a MSO 5 series scope might cost you 20k+ USD, and the software option might cost another 10k+ USD. Or if you mean customer support, well, I send questions regarding price quot and never got a reply. Yes, I am a long time Tektronix equipment user.
Sorry. Too much misleading info in this video. Cannot help but stop watching now.
Dave is no longer young. He should own that fact.
the warranty / service coverage IS A BIG difference but it is NOT FREE and for high pace production environments having a zero day replacement program is worth $$$ over shutting down to send out your scope
a mini-LED HDR display going to make the scope "better" ??? and I imagine it would be offered if it offered an advantage
made in the USA is often REQUIRED for US government contracts AND utility / transit contracts and they WILL VERIFY what you are using in your work flow so sourcing is IMPORTANT in some cases
and a LOT of stuff is made in CHINA BECAUSE it is the LOWEST COST so having a device designed and build for the LOWEST cost is going to be BY DESIGN "bottom of the barrel" VS companies like Tesla - Apple and TEKTROX that build in China AND maintain top quality and are NOT there for LOW COST but factory scaling OR REQUIRED localization like the comment above about made in the USA
a 20K application is better then NO application for ANY price and LITTLE if ANY support
Bottom of the range Teledyne LeCroy is just a rebadged Siglent SDS5000, except more expensive and lower spec. I have just brought a R&S RTM3004 so quality is what I aim for. I don't like rebadging when it is just to hike the price.
I don’t think that you see the shift happening inside Keithley, Tektronix, Agilent and LeCroy. Their newer products are riddled with bugs, at 100k plus product range one would expect extensive debugging teams and support which we did not see from either of them. I am at the research space and there we do operate all instruments to their limits. We are very very disappointed on the latest series of scopes form all the “big four”. Their integrated bugs, issues and software problems have led several institutes in revising policies and turning towards Rohde & Schwarz and Rigol high end instruments.
I had experience working with new scope products, at a 'real' scope company (or three) and the difficulty of testing ALL of the possible interactions across the measurements and applications is a daunting task... I commonly found problems that the development team test folks had not found, because I used the scopes 6 hours per day, making every kind of measurement I could think of; the test guys were, in fact, happy that *I* found bugs, before they got to the customer!!
BTW, the designers do an awful lot of work to ensure that the products work to spec across not just temperature, but all the possible internal parts variations, connector wear, multiple probes, and over time... as we say, 'non-trivial' ;-)
@@lohikarhu734 an uncle of mine worked for Tektronics and back in the day the amount of R/D and bug bounty teams WAS massive and likely larger then all of RIGOL corp
I have heard that it is NOT the same anymore and much the same inside H/P instrumentation but do NOT have first hand information
At work, one fairly modern, mid-end Tektronix oscilloscope has a number of bugs, one is that voltage and time labels are the wrong way around for the cursors. I've also noticed a few other really annoying bugs.
Yep. After HP and Tek got taken over by the greedy rent seekers, engineering takes a back seat. It's all about trading on "The Brand."
I went R &S to replace my Tek MDO3024. I would have had to sell the house to buy a Tektronix.
I used to work in the broadcast tv world and 90% of the test kit was Tetronix. On a live show if things broke and you needed to locate the fault then you couldn’t be messing about setting up your tools.
I'm still in broadcast engineering (AM/FM) and quality tools are indeed a necessity. I have found that, for my purposes, the abundance of features offered by a $1,000 Siglent scope are more important to me than the extreme precision and stability of a higher-end instrument. I think I might feel differently if I worked in digital television.
@@rickmartin6817 I’m slowly getting back into electronics as a hobby and recently got a siglent scope. It’s quite remarkable the features it has for the cost. 4 channels too
If you had a vintage Tek scope, and had a peek inside, the price premium reasons were obvious. They've also proved their quality over time. I'll still resort to my 465B to do the occasional test--there's nothing like an analog scope for some things...
My older low end scope had noticeable RF EMI radiation. My new Keysight 1200 series scope does not. If you do a lot of high sensitivity RF receiver work this is important! Many of these low end scopes do NOT meet their own specs! One brand supposedly 100 mhz scope only reaches 30 mhz flat. The Keysight 1200 is FLAT to the end of the bandwidth. You can actually use the damn thing to what it is advertised as! That is why you pay double. (along with the points made in the video)
Was fascinated with your tube making videos.
Yeah, I'm 100% in the low-end market. :D My Rigol suits a lot of what I want to do, although there are things I'd like to do that I absolutely cannot afford to. Meh. Not a big deal.
There are the monster "oscilloscopes", the ones that take up half of a floor-mounted 19" rack. Long time back we had a Tektronix scope system in the lab with 120 analog channel recording capability (although we could have expanded it to 240 channels). IIRC each channel could record a gigasample at 200MHz. It was integrated with the Tektronix monster logic analyser system that filled the other half of the 19" rack. Tektronix installed an on-site system engineer to ride herd on this beast when they delivered it since it was one of the first of its type. This system was used for chip design and development, saved the company millions of dollars in turnaround time for design iterations.
I work in an educational institution. We have some of those TBS scopes, never use the educational features and Rigols have been creeping in to places outside the main labs. I suspect the only reason for buying the low end Tek scopes is to maintain a good relationship in order to buy more expensive stuff.
I thought the companies would almost be paying you to have their scopes in your institution, like Xilinx did with FPGAs in education. If you train students on platform X in school, then when they go work somewhere, they will want to use what they're already familiar with, and will thus influence the purchasing decision of the company they work for.
Teks have better FFT and UI.
@@gorak9000 my experience TEK and "friends" almost "paid" to setup main labs and the "retail" price is more of a "tax" issue / private school - students to home purchase
I know the tech school I went to EVERY LAB had some level of "donated" gear with the automotive makers donating whole cars and systems along with "factory" grade test equipment "read" H/P Agilent - now keysight and "snap-on" hand tools and students got a one time purchase chance at graduation from H/P Agilent and snap-on
@@gorak9000 Absolutely, just as drug companies pitch to young doctors, I still use PIC microcontrollers for low end projects for that reason; I kinda grew up with them, and if it will do the required job, within budget, I will continue to use them.
I use to be tek guy before I met Siglent. Siglent have more bang for their buck. By the time you add the options, you are 4 fold deep in. i Bought Siglent for my home lab. i am not a hobbyist. i work for ADI (Analog Devices). pretty much much of the ICs inside Tek or Siglent comes from ADI. I use Siglent scope and Spectrum Analyzer along with other stuff on daily bases. very happy with my purchase. Siglent manage to do it without compromising performance with 1/3 of price.
I do work from my home lab. I have several pieces from Siglent and Rigol. Tek and hp are better, but most of the time the Rigol Siglent is good enough. If price were no option it would be Tek Hp but price is my driving factor.
@@EfieldHfield_377 with everything there is always "better" but at what cost and for "home lab" work a siglent as long as YOU can trust its output and it does what you need it to do it is ALL YOU NEED
@@jasonriddell I make a living as an independent consultant. Took years to get comfortable with them but over time you learn the limits of what they are. For example once I needed to decode a CAN a SPI and a few other signals simultaneously the Rigol 4000 absolutely chocked. Tek ate it up. Once you know those limits and stay within bounds you are good.
@@jasonriddell One other thing I have found is I only need concern myself with the Scope and Spec An. Everything else I have desktop DMM arb gens, eLoads, LCR, Power Supply, that kind of stuff pretty much works just as good. UI can be querky at times but you get use to it.
That's right. I've been using ADI for fifty years, remember the old orange parts manual, that was my bible. Tek are just too expensive. I''ve become an R&S man now.
A few of related stories:
- In my second year of college studying electronics engineering (mid-1970s), I was a starving student who desperately wanted to own an oscilloscope. I rented a basement room from some older people in a small town (they also allowed me to join them for meals at no extra charge). The husband was a almost-ready-to-retire field service technician for a major mainframe computer manufacturer, and he told me that when he went into the local branch office there were several very nice Tektronix scopes on carts that the in-house technicians used to repair circuits boards and such. He saw one of them had an "out of order" tag, and he asked his boss about it. He was told that a repairman from the local Tek office (how many other companies even had LOCAL offices?) had checked it out and said the power transformer was blown and the CRT had a lot of burn-in, and they decided to requisition a new scope rather than fix this bad one. My landlord said he had a tenant who was a struggling engineering student in need of a scope, and the paperwork was written 'writing off" that scope and it became mine. But of course it was not working, and I also had no manual for it. I asked one of my professors if I could borrow the manual for the college's lab scopes, which were in the same series (with pluggable vertical and horizontal amplifier modules) as the one I had. Perusing the manual, I saw inside the back cover a notice that Tektronix had such-and-such a long warranty, but since they manufactured their own CRTs and transformers in-house, THOSE were warrantied for "the life of the scope". My landlord asked the local Tek office to send him a copy of the service man's report, saying all the scope needed were those two items, and I send a copy to the Tektronix with a short letter (also mentioning that I had 'lost' my manual) and my address. I did not really expect to even hear back from them. About three days later, when I got home from school, my landlady said that a guy on a Tektronix van had stopped by and left two packages for me; a new CRT and a new power transformer. A couple days later, and new manual arrived in the mail. In short order, that magnificent scope was purring like a kitten again. It wasn't until years later that I realized what a nice, high end scope it was, and how lucky I was to own it, for zero expenditure of dollars. I have to wonder what the experience would have been like with today's scope manufacturers such as Rigol or Siglent !!!
- I still own a fairly old Fluke digital multimeter from the mid-1970s, an original 70 series model. About once every decade, I send it back to Fluke who makes sure all is perfect and calibrated with it, and returns it with a new seal of traceable calibration, and their charge for doing this is minimal. Not many makers of multimeters will even acknowledge their older models, much less service them.
- I still regularly use a couple analog scopes made by Tektronix. They still provide support for them, documentation is easily obtained. All service and calibration businesses I have had experience will will happily, readily and inexpensively repair and calibrate them, even though they are long out of production. Parts are available.
I bought one of Siglent's top of the line digital scopes a few years ago, just because I wanted to have one on hand with a much higher bandwidth, four channels, and an integral logic analyzer. From the start, its user interface was buggy and awkward. The controls are not well organized, nor are the on-screen menus. Doing firmware updates is a chore and it likely to hang up or even crash mid-upgrade. Siglent USA seems to only have one person to do everything, and I have found support practically nonexistent. The scope did not come with a manual, nor was one available from Siglent. When I chastised them for selling scopes with no available documentation on features and navigating menus, their response was that they can't be expected to cater to people ignorant about how scopes work! I still have it, but never use it, and only hold onto it because I don't want to hand its problems to some other unsuspecting person. My next scope, if there is one, will most likely come from Tektronix, and I will be happy to pay their price for the much better experience.
that was nice of them
You had such an incredible customer support experience it's a little perplexing you purchased a Siglent. Surely you understood that level of support cost money. So was it just price that trumped your remarkable history?
@habcollector , no, I had a tax refund to spend, thought about getting a newer scope with an integrated logic analyzer. The tax refund would only buy a Siglent, and I thought it would be OK. I could not justify a Tek scope with similar features, as they were several times the cost, and I still planned for my Tek analog scopes to be my main ones. I did not expect the Tek level of service and support from Siglent, but I expected they would have at least a downloadable manual, and was horrified that nobody had bothered to even write one, not even online tutorials about the various features.
@@youtuuba Tek and Hp products are just better - period. But as an independent consultant I cannot afford that price point and 95% of the time they are good enough. For the other 5% I have friends with nice toys I can borrow. When I worked for companies I would always spec Tek, but on my bench (that I purchased new) is a collection of Rigol, Siglent and GwInstek products. I do have an old Hp desktop DMM, SigGen and Counter I got from eBay, back when eBay was a deal. There is a Tek MDO4034 I borrow at times when I have to, but other than that I do real work (not a hobbyist) and get paid for it. I would love a Tek or Hp of my own, but the price point the difference I cannot justify at my level of revenue. Yes there are better (in every way), but not the large price difference better. Thx for sharing your wonderful story it was a pleasure reading.
Your Tek experience was awesome! How long ago was your underwhelming Siglent experience, and which model scope?
I've got a vacuum tube tek scope at home I use from time to time. The build quality inside is absolutely remarkable, made to be serviced as quickly and efficiently as possible
Me too, only gripe is that the calibration procedure is always "if you can't get it in spec by twiddling all the knobs, replace all the tubes". Very costly in 2022!
@@tmmtmm In all fairness, the fact the instrument has survived long enough to still be useful 50+ years down the line is still pretty impressive. I can't possibly see much of anything from 2022 surviving into 2072 for a service call
Owned some of the smaller 5 MHz b/w Tek tube scopes at one time. Not as bulky as their top models and the build quality inside was always worth marvelling at. They should have installed windows in their tube scopes so you could admire the insides.
@@tomsherwood4650 The Tek Type 310 was a marvel of engineering and quality! It should be in a design museum!
Take good care of those wonderful instruments.
Worthwhile mentioning probes. Your oscilloscope probe is often the front-end of your measurement system. Tektronix design their own probes, and they are expensive, for a good reason. The combination of a Tek probe and scope is a measurement system, and the combination will still meet bandwidth specification. Probe specification is often overlooked and the importance is under estimated. Be aware of what a bad probe can do to your measurement.
Tek probes are very good,electrically, low capacitance, small size, but they aren't very durable. The tip resistor capsule breaks and it costs $300+ dollars to replace them.
Price is one thing. Their UI and UX being absolute dogshit is a whole another thing.
I'm completely one Dave's side, but one major point is missing why Tek scopes are expensive. Danaher Corp: 'milking the Cash-Cow to unconsciousness ®'
There is milking for sure.
Anyone else remember Nicolet? Their scopes used to be built (and priced) like tanks, perfect for field service.Mine traveled the world with me and never gave a problem.
Buyer beware, those small Tek DSO scopes have horrible UIs, the buttons start failing debounce after a while, and the rotary knobs crap out too.
But...But...The Courseware! Applictions Support! Longevity of production.
@@NeverTalkToCops1 Maybe not important to you, but I *like* knowing that the investment I'm making in production equipment for my new product can still get feasible upgrade support in another 10 years or so: If you're building something to sell, the quality of what you sell is closely related to the process control you have over the machines and systems that build it.
But when they first came to market there was no other manufacturer doing anything better. The scope Dave is showing right now although at Tek's lower end, it is nothing like the old low end Tek scopes. This scope also comes with not to bad warranty options such as repair or replace no questions asked like if you drop and brake the screen for example.
@@greglinder5784 "Feasible up grade support"? If you have a 10 Ghz bandwith oscilloscope do you expect an upgrade to 25 or 50 Ghz in 10 years will be available as an upgrade?
@@NeverTalkToCops1 some scopes it is a software limit so yes and buying the same scope in higher bandwidth and receiving the same UI / control logic is important in some lab situations
During my High School years I got my first introduction to test and measurement gear. First was the Tektronix 500 series scopes, then came more modern instruments like the Tektronix 465 and the TM 500 series mainframe instruments. I could almost pick out all the Tektronix gear that used as props in the television series "Battlestar Galactica". In the late 70's and early 80's I was fortunate to get tours of Tektronix and Fluke, it was an awesome experience. My dad had a friend who's wife worked at Tektronix and would get me component "roll ends". Now my home test and measurement lab is populated with gear I would of never guessed I would ever use let alone own. Instruments that were 10's of thousands of dollars can now be had for pennies on the dollar. Yes they may be old and obsolete but the quality used in their construction assures if properly maintained can last for decades.
My dad's old 310a that he brought home used in 1966 is still going strong on my bench. I fix old radios why not use an old scope?
A friend of mine worked for a Major Company, and called the reps for various mfrs to find out what they had that would meet a particular need. Tek asked: How many do you expect to need? Answer: A few thousand. Tek: Tell us what you want it to do and we'll build it. It became part of the standard line (or more likely, option package).
that is one THING the "big houses" can do and MAKE one off tools for one off jobs even snap-on will make custom tools for custom applications and price is dependant on how many YOU order / how sellable it is after they R/D it
I used LeCroy scope for years starting with their first in about 1980. Some cost over $48K. One was unreliable for years I finally wanted to send for repair but they denied coverage of any kind after 7 years. This cost $48K. I took it apart and found prototype PCBs with tinlead instead of gold connectors. They still would not support this. Did I remake their boards with tin lead? They offered me the cheapest obsolete 4 channel scope in trade. I got it and it was a tiny fraction of what I had in the original. I have never bought another Lecroy product. My lifetime purchases from them at that time was in excess of $250K. Not bad for one guy. I bought two Rhodies a while back and found them pretty good. Some silly limitations like averaging is on all channels or none instead individually. I have called support and talked to good folks. I got promised call back too. Lecroy is impossible to talk to. In the early years Lecroy was lightyears ahead of Tek and everyone else too bad I won't ever buy one again. I would entertain Tek or Agilent but probably not buy.
Le Croy was great back in the day, today there isn't much reason to buy them.
Mileage may vary. I own 2 used wr 6k and a wp7k and except of worn out knobs it was a way better experience than the tek tds 5k. Although Yokogawa dlm2054 beat both of them in power electronics staff.
Yea same experience with LeCroy, used to have lots of them in the lab, but their post sales and customer service are shite to say the least. We can do all the repairs in house, but they are just being beyond unreasonably unhelpful and mean. So we never bought another one from them again, mostly Tek instruments in the lab now.
Certainly Germany also has export control on some products and technologies... R&S does a LOT of 'government' business with 'agencies', who require very strict control on the export of the devices and technologies in use.
I’d love a list/review of the low end (sub ~2k$) scopes from the top brands. It’s not always easy to compare them, specially the details about the “extras” like digital analyzers, how easy is to script them from a computer,…
I to would like to see a round up of the "education" /1000 series scopes
Because you keep buying them.
I have a problem with how much quality has been suffering lately. A 2022 fluke isnt nearly as good as a 2012 on
Many valid points but having worked in "high end" industries I have never seen a scope used for precise measurements. Lots of diagnosis, debugging and trouble shooting.. I also see lots of "high end" businesses feared into paying mega bucks for cal on equipment that just does not make sense. Sometimes yes, but for the most its a waste of time and money. Countless times I have needed to do a job but the gear is off for cal. It spends more time at cal than actual use.. Lets not forget that just because it was cal'ed today that it is accurate tomorrow. Experience and know how is key to confidence in a measurement, not a cal certificate. I have countless depressing stories regarding cal.
CAL is a great blame shifter "we HAD it checked talk to THEM not US
I agree most signals probed with scopes don't need high precision and traceability. It's a racket. If accuracy and precision is so important every scope would have to have at least a 12 bit ADC, when most have 8 bits. Logic signals values are dependent on their power rail voltages, the actual voltage of the signal doesn't require 1% accuracy. What really annoys me is very few scope models including medium to high end don't have a 10 MHz reference for the time base and sampling. Every reasonable signal generator does, arbitrary and RF. I run all my gear with a GPSDO, but none of my scopes have the necessary input.
That said, you are paying for lots of middle aged middle men justifing all of the above. If a business wanted to startup tomorrow ticking all those boxes and reducing cost via leanness, you could. It's only the establishment that stops it. Once a generation of people move on, the next generation rethinks the status quo. And if your country doesn't do it, another country will.
Quite right.
Keysight and TEK both CAN AND DO build "consumer" priced scopes in the 1K range with there "education" line and I bet they are higher performance scopes "down graded" to the spec as to be NOT TO GOOD of a value
Great video, lots of good information. I'm retired and only use test equipment for hobby stuff so Siglent it is. Mainly because the CFO/Wife won't approve the expenditure for better.
Some marketing person is probably thinking you missed the "brand dilution" reason. If you make a cheap version that is lower in quality for all the reasons you mentioned, now you can't claim that your brand is industry leading in terms of quality. This is the reason you have car companies (eg Toyota vs Lexus) that have different brands depending on the market they are targeting.
but they CAN and DO make a "cheap" scope in there "education" lines and do NOT talk about them beyond say they exist
but BRAND "value" is very important to these companies AND consumers Toyota sells almost every LEXUS car as a Toyota NOT in America as Americans WONT pay Lexus pricing for a "Toyota"
foreign companies cannot "own" by technicalities the factory in China they have to have a majority stakeholder in China. They may run, watch over, test etc. with their own employees but in they do not own the factory or land, that is owned by China. Only a civilian can own their residence. Companies will say they "own" their own factories, in my line of work they claim that all the time and they actually fundamentally do not it has to be owned by a Chinese national or have ownership in the company structure. Why Tencent controls a minority stake in many gaming companies operating in China, Tencent owns the Chinese rights in China. Companies that say this BS really piss me off, the rules are simple, they do it to trick the gullible, why not say it correctly we have direct oversite and a qc team over a Chinese factory making products to our specification. Easy, simple and the truth. Ask any investor in the USA or elsewhere about property in Belize or any Petroleum company that had assets in Columbia. Or dare I say the R country for any country that want's to use any reason to take assets of R countries citizens. this has nothing to do with the quality and price of any equipment, many great things are made/assembled in China for obvious reasons (good or bad) this is just a critique on specific rights of ownership.
You know, I'm not sure it's a good idea to use the old saying: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". Since IBM didn't realize how hard competition became in the 90s and nearly went bankrupt because of their arrogance. Since then this old saying is actually outdated in my opinion.
We have seen this sort of pattern before, it happened with computers.
Then the big pricey brands were restricted upwards while the bottom end was eaten up.
Then the mid-range was destroyed when the realization struck that the value for money was terrible.
And finally the top end fell when the rate of development accelerated on the mid to low end and most feature advantages were lost.
My prediction, the high end of test equipment will experience more and increasing pressure from the low end. The cost of the high end will increase and the profit margins will drop. Eventually customers will question if they really need those high end guarantees and in most cases they will conclude that they do not. This will then leave a few ultra expensive options for those who truly need it.
even outside of test equipment there is a BIG shift of lower end getting "better value" but NOT "better" and the pro products getting even LESS affordable and eventually pricing themselves out of contention outside of the 1% that NEED the "better X" that they offer for multiples more money
I used to work in medical equipment manufacture. Test procedures were regularly audited by FDA since lives were on the line. You can bet that I would not incorporate any equipment that required me to rewrite a test procedure every year. Each rewrite costs thousands of dollars. Pay an extra $2k to avoid a yearly rewrite is a no-brainer
and having a "proven" brand with up to date calibration is also good "insurance" when they DO COME calling
HOW MANY scopes does one person need ?!!
I see all the scopes Dave has and feel nothing but jealousy because I still have an old TDS1000 from 20 years ago that struggles to do what I need 😂😂
Lol we were looking to do PCIe signal integrity testing today at work and I was asking myself the exact same thing!!!
@Natalie mia gosh I heard Mr Williams Ferguson was a horrific Russian oligarch’s warlord who murders Ukrainian POW’s for Sport! Is that not true?
Dude why is my comment sending me notifications about the glorious fake Mr Williams Ferguson? I know so many dudes that go by the plural name “Williams” lol lol
ນິ້ງທີ່ນີ້ລນິ ＋𝟭𝟲𝟭𝟳𝟯𝟵𝟳𝟭𝟵𝟱𝟭 າທີ່ນີ້ລນີ້👎
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*He's on What's Apk messenger 👆👆*
Nah, I invested with “Williams”… he thinks he is 6 different William’s… you know.. multiple personality disorder. He lost my entire life savings. His shrewd investor William personality gave everything to his gambling addict William personality, who lost everything….
What most people do not appreciate is that the cost of the test instrument can be a very small part of the overall cost in an end user T&M environment even if the cost an individual instrument is tens of thousands of dollars. Highly regulated environments such as military, medical, nuclear and others spend an enormous amount of money and time on verification and validation of test procedures and specialized test equipment to ensure that the end DUTs meet specifications. Traceable, reliable, high quality test equipment is vital for this and if, say, a particular model of oscilloscope cannot be used because it is no longer available, the cost in time and money to revalidate procedures for the new instrument can easily be an order of magnitude more expensive than the cost of the different test instrument. This is why many organizations will choose to keep using "obsolete" test equipment and even purchase it on the used market to keep their production lines working.
edited for clarity
We have a lot of extremely expensive instruments at work, for several reasons: 1) Very high frequencies involved, and 2) Support - engineers from the provider actually visit occasionally, and we get calibration and things done (though salespeople also visit now and then, in order to get us to buy newer and even more expensive stuff), but no. 3) is also very important: however expensive a particular instrument is, say, $10k or $50k - that amount of money is quickly wasted if it stops us for some days because of a problem. So it's expensive, but it's more expensive if there are problems or shortcomings with something cheaper.
You gave the answer with the question at the start: If the run of the mill battery is more expensive than a whole oscilloscope the answer is clear.