Keysight oscilloscope

[morls]

Hi,
Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts/experience with this scope?

EDUX1052G Oscilloscope: 50 MHz, 2 Analog Channels, with a Built-in Waveform Generator

 

[Bo Deadly]

It's hard to say without actually trying it. Looks like it has a lot of fancy features but you would probably not use 90% of them honestly. The math features like FFT on my old DSO is completely useless. It looks like the FFT of this is nicer but the spec sheet says the vertical resolution is only 8 bits so FFT can't be that much better. The display on a 10 bit scope will look a lot nicer. If I were buying a new scope and found a 10 bit for reasonable money, I think I would pony up the extra $$ to get 10 bit. Also, try and buy from a manufacturer who's been around for a while. Tektronix will be expensive but there are others that have been around for a while.

 

[mjrippe]

Keysight is a solid company. Check out your fellow Aussie, Dave over at EEVBlog, I believe he has done some reviews.

 

[morls]

Thanks, I'll check out these options

 

[john12ax7]

I've used the 3000 series, they are nice scopes. Never tried the 1000 but don't think you can go too wrong with Keysight or Tektronix. A lot will come down to the features and price / performance you need.

 

[john12ax7]

Also, try and buy from a manufacturer who's been around for a while.

Good advice to stick with reputable manufacturers. Just want to point out that Keysight is the same as Agilent which is the same HP.. The company has segmented with new names over the years to focus on different markets.

 

[neil.johnson]

Hi,
Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts/experience with this scope?

EDUX1052G Oscilloscope: 50 MHz, 2 Analog Channels, with a Built-in Waveform Generator

Keysight (was Agilent, which was HP... so plenty of history behind it) is a top professional brand -- one of the big four (the others being Tektronix, LeCroy and Rohde&Schwarz). What you're getting there is the educational version: same front end as the bigger models, but lower bandwidth, less memory and reduced software feature set (e.g., serial protocols are missing SPI, CAN and LIN).
If it has the features you want at a price you're comfortable then go for it. And with USB you can hook it up to a PC and use the bigger screen and data storage.

Neil

 

[morls]

Thanks John and Neil,
I've been in touch with Keysight here in Australia, and they have been very helpful. As noted, the EDU range is geared towards education, and there is a lot of documentation, as well as tutorials and built-in test tones that I'm going to make the most of. My main interest is to test my amplifiers, compressors and other gear I build, so I think 50MHz should be plenty of bandwidth. The EDUX1052G has the features I'm most interested in - built in function generator, comes with a Bode plot training kit, FFT, gain and phase Bode plotting, DVM and frequency counter.
Ticks all the right boxes for me. It costs a bit more than other scopes I've looked at, but the documentation will be really useful for me.

 

[john12ax7]

Are you near any major universities? If so they might have some on campus. If are nice to the folks running the labs you could probably get some hands on time to see how much you like it in person. Keysight might also have some loaner / demo units you could borrow. They may not do that for an individual but certainly would for a campus. Worth at least asking.

 

[Bo Deadly]

Thanks John and Neil,
I've been in touch with Keysight here in Australia, and they have been very helpful. As noted, the EDU range is geared towards education, and there is a lot of documentation, as well as tutorials and built-in test tones that I'm going to make the most of. My main interest is to test my amplifiers, compressors and other gear I build, so I think 50MHz should be plenty of bandwidth. The EDUX1052G has the features I'm most interested in - built in function generator, comes with a Bode plot training kit, FFT, gain and phase Bode plotting, DVM and frequency counter.
Ticks all the right boxes for me.

Great. But again, bear in mind that those feature are really just for basic measurements. For example, if you want to study how well some audio gear is performing, you would use a USB audio interface to output the test tone, record the output of the device and generate an FFT with software because the resolution of the results will be much better. Oscilloscopes are designed to be fast, not high resolution. The ADC on that scope is only 8 bits. With some over sampling finaglery, it's made to look like 10 bits maybe. So the resolution is not good good enough to measure THD or see harmonics at 90 dB down. The function generator probably isn't very good either because the OS is just some embedded thing so just a sine output alone is probably not even anywhere near the THD of an op amp you might be trying to measure.

So I wouldn't get too jazzed about features like that. Buy a scope that is good at doing scope stuff and get a good USB audio interface for doing spectrum analysis.

 

[morls]

All good points. I've got a high quality interface, preamps and some good analysis software, so will have both angles covered

Quoting from the specs, "the high resolution mode uses boxcar averaging to effectively increase vertical resolution to 12 bits @ >20us/div at 1GSa/s".

The waveforms generated are sine, square ramp, pulse, DC and noise.
THD of sine is 1%, 0.1Hz to 20MHz.
SNR (50 Ω load, 500 MHz bandwidth): 40 dB (typical); 30 dB (min).

So yeah, very noisy compared to what I can get out of my DAW. Should still be useful though.

Other scopes around this price range have greater bandwidth, and some up to 4 channels. I'm hoping to get a good quality scope by going 2 channels and 50MHz. In any case, I've gone ahead and placed an order so I'm looking forward to playing around with this.
Cheers
Stephen

 

[Bo Deadly]

SNR (50 Ω load, 500 MHz bandwidth): 40 dB (typical); 30 dB (min).

So yeah, very noisy compared to what I can get out of my DAW. Should still be useful though.

I wouldn't say it's "noisy". It's just that it doesn't have the range to "zoom in" on part of a large signal. So it uses a stepped attenuator on the input to make the signal use as much of the ADC range as possible. If you've ever used a digital scope you might notice that the vertical scale is stepped and not continuously adjustable and there can be a clicking noise as you change the vertical scale. That's relays clicking as it steps attenuation.