My new Oscilloscope Keysight EDUX1002G

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#61
Keysight (nee Agilent, nee HP) is a company that's been making oscilloscopes and other test equipment for considerably longer than I've been alive, and I'm not young. Keysight/Agilent/HP developed a significant amount of the IP that makes a modern oscilloscope do what it does (though their influence early on is probably more in Logic/Protocol/Spectrum analysers and synthesisers than oscilloscopes).

Rigol is a brand that's sprung out of nowhere in the last few years and made instruments that are really copies of what's been developed by Keysight, Tektronics, and LeCroy, using the fast converters and gear that others have put the hard yards in developing.

The Rigol one is clearly cheaper for a given sample rate/bandwidth/memory depth/whatever metric you fancy. However it probably hasn't been developed by people who have seen literally everything there is to see in CROs, so I wouldn't trust it's measurements to the same degree that I'd trust something from Keysight, Tek, or LeCroy.

Plus, their business model is based on doing a copy cheaper. What do they do when the next guy comes along and undercuts them?
 
#62
Hi Mario,
I think Suzy really nailed it there. The one thing she didn't touch on are the unspoken extras that are often included with the top 'scope brands. This include features, and software you can download for free or nominal cost. The probes are a higher quality as well. The day to day handling is also better on the top brands, plus there is better support. One thing you weren't aware of is that the Keysight scopes have been hacked as well. Also, the analog sections on the top scopes are better than the less expensive products are.
 
#63
Hi Tom,
I've brought this issue (viruses) up with the people at Keysight. If I buy a 'scope, the last thing I want to see on it is a tech playing a game or something. A piece of test equipment should do what it is designed to do and nothing else. Certainly I wouldn't trust thousands of dollars to the folks at Microsoft! They can't even get running a PC right, never mind a 'scope!

-Chris
 
#64
Good comments, all!

After looking around for a bit, I just finally picked up a nice Keysight DSO. It's my first digital and I've been spoiled by my old Tek analogs. You're right about the unspoken extras, quality and support. To say I am pleased would be an understatement. I have to confess however, I was a bit miffed about the quality of one of my probes; it's kinda sticky when compressed and the ground clip was EXTREMELY hard to attach. But, I expect when I call them to express my dissatisfaction, a new probe will be on the way, pronto.

It's probably good they didn't have these around when I was young; it would have made me lazy.
😀

mlloyd1
 
#66
I'm sure I will.
I've been using an Agilent MSO-X 3024A and Tek TDS5030B as my primary horses at the office for the past 4 years. I like both a LOT but decided on the DSO-X 3024T for home (yes, I'd been planning and saving for this for a while🙂 ).
With my Tek 2465B, I'm good now with scopes in the home lab.

mlloyd1
 
#67
Just to be sure, we are super far away from the op's questions. I don't want someone new stumbling across this thread and thinking they need a 1GHz scope and network analyzer.

I do really like the keysight I have at work, even though I haven't needed to drive it lately. Not too high end either.
 
#69
Hi everyone, great conversations and comments. I’ve been flat out at work and haven’t had much time with my hobby. It’s great to see this thread is helping others.
Thanks again to all those who are contributing. 🙂
 
#71
Hi mlloyd1,
Excellent choice! Yours will show an eye pattern much better than the one I have. It's all about time and your's has come along way from when mine was new. I think you already know yours is really good enough to replace an analog scope if needed. Certainly for audio work. I still need an analog 'scope for those kinds of waveforms.

-Chris
 
#72
suzyj said:
Rigol is a brand that's sprung out of nowhere in the last few years and made instruments that are really copies of what's been developed by Keysight, Tektronics, and LeCroy, using the fast converters and gear that others have put the hard yards in developing.

The Rigol one is clearly cheaper for a given sample rate/bandwidth/memory depth/whatever metric you fancy. However it probably hasn't been developed by people who have seen literally everything there is to see in CROs
Click to expand...

Interesting post. Here is what I know and it is verified as I dug a lot back then. Siglent, another chinese brand that develops its own scopes - confirmed as per teardowns done by Dave from eevblog - produce the cheaper scopes LeCroy sells. Rigol has a part of the Tektronix team on it, I know of two engineers that have been attracted to work for them. They have been producing medical equipment for much longer. Teardowns of their scopes do not reveal them of being copies. They have been set against very high end scopes from Tek and Agilent (go on eevblog and watch if you will) and measure within specs although they of course lack the precision of the later (but it is stated in their tolerance sheets). Power suppies use questionable quality capacitors and many Rigols have noisy fans.

That being said and it is really well covered online, one just has to search, all you wrote appears as coming from the fingers of an Agilent/Tek employee. Sorry but I wouldn`t take even 2% of what you wrote as independent.
 
#73
Hi Mario,
Well, gee. I know Suzy isn't an employee of either Keysight or Tektronix. Neither am I. I'm speaking from first hand knowledge from both the position of a customer, and as a calibration technician. I restore old equipment, both test and audio. I've bought newer equipment and have suffered failures and the lack of support from products originating from the far east. I have had a Rigol on loan and it was a pretty good little 'scope. However, the Keysight and other top brands offer more that you don't find on a spec sheet. From what I see lately, and from long history with oscilloscopes and other test equipment, my preference is for Keysight product. Their history goes back a little further than does Rigol or similar brands. Does that matter? Yes, I think it does.

-Chris
 
#75
Mario Pankov said:
Interesting post. Here is what I know and it is verified as I dug a lot back then. Siglent, another chinese brand that develops its own scopes - confirmed as per teardowns done by Dave from eevblog - produce the cheaper scopes LeCroy sells. Rigol has a part of the Tektronix team on it, I know of two engineers that have been attracted to work for them. They have been producing medical equipment for much longer. Teardowns of their scopes do not reveal them of being copies. They have been set against very high end scopes from Tek and Agilent (go on eevblog and watch if you will) and measure within specs although they of course lack the precision of the later (but it is stated in their tolerance sheets). Power suppies use questionable quality capacitors and many Rigols have noisy fans.

That being said and it is really well covered online, one just has to search, all you wrote appears as coming from the fingers of an Agilent/Tek employee. Sorry but I wouldn`t take even 2% of what you wrote as independent.
Click to expand...

If you had left it without the last part you would have been very valid in your comment. I would say that Suzy might not be well informed, relying on historically biased information rather than the current situation, but that doesn't mean that Suzy is actively malicious.

To expand on the quality part of your comment: Your comment is the first I have heard about them being involved with hospital equipment. As for oscilloscopes, Rigol actually got their start making the entry level DSO1000 for Agilent/Keysight a LONG time ago. Whether the DS1052B was first and Agilent/Keysight saw a chance or Agilent/Keysight approached Rigol first (a la Siglent/LeCroy) is not currently known but certainly the partnership with Agilent/Keysight paid massive dividends on the quality of their instruments. Truthfully, they were the first company from China to really release a scope that didn't suck horribly. Sure, it had its bugs but overall it did what it claimed. Additionally, they have shown signs of ironing out almost all of the bugs that do appear at launch for their products (though it can take years). For example, the DS10x4Z series was rather buggy at launch with notable issues. At this point, those have pretty much all been eliminated and overall the software runs as bug-free as any Keysight/Tek/LeCroy. As responsive or intuitive? Not remotely, but bug-free yes. It just took them a long time to get there. On the other hand, there are rumors that Rigol took much more than just Agilent/Keysights assistance on a single scope and that is why the two companies teamed up on only a single scope, I will leave it at that.

Switching to Siglent, they sprung from the ashes of Atten/Gratten who lost a lawsuit with LeCroy and basically shutdown. I am unsure if they were the company to hold the LeCroy/Atten partnership (as the partnership online dates earlier than the lawsuit) but after the lawsuit all Atten related stuff appeared as Siglent (including software). They have shown signs that they take a BIT more care upon first release of a scope, as theirs have been notably less buggy. That being said, they don't seem to support their product lines nearly as long as Rigol so some don't reach the level of maturity that Rigol's do. That being said, they have been aligned with LeCroy since 2007 and it is paying dividends for both companies. Siglent handles the hardware side of things, where they are experts at building down to a cost, while LeCroy provides the software and technical/design guidance. Unlike what you indicated, this actually extends from the bottom level well into the "mid-range" as shown below:


Though Siglent is far from their only partner. They also regularly have partnered with Iwatsu to develop their scopes, much in a similar manner.
  • The LeCroy WaveJet series is also the Iwatsu DS-5x00 series. Depending on the exact version of WaveJet, it is a different DS-5x00 model.
  • The older WaveSurfer lines were Iwatsu made, with LeCroy software
  • The WaveRunner lines were Iwatsu made, with LeCroy software
  • The old 9000 series LeCroy were also Iwatsu made, unsure about software.

anatech said:
Hi Mario,
Well, gee. I know Suzy isn't an employee of either Keysight or Tektronix. Neither am I. I'm speaking from first hand knowledge from both the position of a customer, and as a calibration technician. I restore old equipment, both test and audio. I've bought newer equipment and have suffered failures and the lack of support from products originating from the far east. I have had a Rigol on loan and it was a pretty good little 'scope. However, the Keysight and other top brands offer more that you don't find on a spec sheet. From what I see lately, and from long history with oscilloscopes and other test equipment, my preference is for Keysight product. Their history goes back a little further than does Rigol or similar brands. Does that matter? Yes, I think it does.

-Chris
Click to expand...

Certainly service is one of the major differentiators between the Far East companies and the western companies. It has been that way for a long time, even the Japanese companies do not treat after sales service the same way that the western companies do. Which is why it can be very hard to repair equipment from Japanese/Korean/Chinese/Taiwanese companies when it breaks, they don't even try to help you out. As for my own scope, it is a KeySight, though the one before it was a LeCroy/Siglent which was OK. The one before that was a LeCroy/Iwatsu. So I guess the KeySight is the first scope I own which was actually designed by the name on the label.
 
#76
suzyj said:
The Rigol one is clearly cheaper for a given sample rate/bandwidth/memory depth/whatever metric you fancy. However it probably hasn't been developed by people who have seen literally everything there is to see in CROs, so I wouldn't trust it's measurements to the same degree that I'd trust something from Keysight, Tek, or LeCroy.
Click to expand...

The other thing to consider is how the equipment deals with overload. The HP/Agilent/Keysight/Nom d'Jour folks design stuff so that as little as possible fries on overload - at least they have in the past. When I accidentally hooked the screen grid rather than g1 to my HP3562, all I needed to replace was a couple of relays and a resistor. Nothing major. Do that to a Rigol scope... Who knows.

It's relatively straight forward to design something that works well within its limits, but designing something that fails gracefully or survives overload is a whole other ball of wax.

anatech said:
I've brought this issue (viruses) up with the people at Keysight. If I buy a 'scope, the last thing I want to see on it is a tech playing a game or something. A piece of test equipment should do what it is designed to do and nothing else.
Click to expand...

When I was at National/TI, I "caught" our sysadmin playing solitaire or our Agilent E5052 phase noise analyzer. Yep. That's right. We spent $150k on that thing so you could play solitaire... Now, it was a pretty laid back place and he was doing actual work and just waiting for a script to execute or something. Still. The juxtaposition was a bit stark. 🙂

Tom
 
#78
Mario Pankov said:
That being said and it is really well covered online, one just has to search, all you wrote appears as coming from the fingers of an Agilent/Tek employee. Sorry but I wouldn`t take even 2% of what you wrote as independent.
Click to expand...

<grin> No, neither an employee of Agilent or Tek. Indeed the last two CROs I’ve purchased for work have both been LeCroys - an expensive 2GHz WaveRunner and a cheapie 100 MHz WaveAce.

I’m just a typical electronics design engineer, with 30 years work building RF stuff. I’ve used and abused test equipment from pretty-much everyone, and formed strong opinions about what is useful and what isn’t along the way based on actual first-hand experience.

I’ve had many examples of cheap knock-off gear being bought on the basis of a quick demo at a trade show, (my previous boss was notorious for this) only to find that they broke, generated huge harmonics, had software that crashed all the time, didn’t meet basic specs, were unsafe, couldn’t be interfaced to anything, were tragically slow, etc etc. Thankfully these days I run the lab, and none of my guys would dare buy rubbish.
 
#79
anatech said:
Hi Tom,
I'm not sure if my comments made it past the sales team at Keysight, but at least they listened and took notes.

-Chris
Click to expand...

We’ve got a few bits of gear at work that run old versions of windoze. In each case we’re simply unable to use them on the network, which severely limits their useability. It’s a serious problem, as when you’re writing up a case to spend $50K+ for a bit of gear you’re thinking of a ten year plus lifespan. This is fundamentally incompatible with the lifetime of IT equipment, which is typically junk after three years. If the test equipment was cheap like the IT equipment it wouldn’t be such a problem.

That said the gear we develop has the same curse. I recently went scouring the world for a lifetime supply of SCSI cables, because they’re totally obsolete and we have gear we need to support for at least the next ten years that’s full of them.
 
#80
Hi Suzi,
I guess you can't use them on their own local network and use a bridge to the main network?

I completely agree with you on the differences between computer equipment and test equipment. Their requirements make them mutually incompatible.

-Chris
 
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