saturation;
I did see that review though it wasn't as complete as I would of liked.
There were a couple members here that either had one or were going to but one. I wonder if they could come forward and post their experiences?
In another forum in a thread that was closed (no idea why) there were a few comments about this scope, but the member who had the most input has his PM's turned off. The main issue to him was phase noise. I downloaded the Rigol specs in one of their glossy brochures and it does look like the phase noise is going to be quite poor. In one of their videos it shows -87dBc/Hz at 10kHz offset at the lower end of the analyser range.
If you are not worried about close to carrier noise performance then I guess this isn't too much of a limitation but it is probably the noisiest analyser I have ever experienced in this respect. It's so noisy I wonder if the analyser uses the same LO/mix strategy as the higher frequency versions.
In terms of signal sensitivity, the data suggests to me that the analyser noise figure with 0dB attenuation is about 40dB and this is about 15dB deafer than many bench analysers.
The input IP3 appears to be +12dBm with 0dB attenuation and this initially looks good but the NF is high so the 3rd order IMD dynamic range will be several dB worse than a half decent 'regular' analyser.
It does have a preamp to get the NF down to about 20dB but I would expect the input IP3 will suffer a lot with this switched in. Another plot shows the phase noise to be about -105dBc/Hz at 100kHz offset. Good enough for most testing but markedly inferior to a regular analyser.
It would be interesting to see how the IP3 holds up on narrow spans as the glossy brochure shows this test at a 10MHz span. I suspect they chose this wide span to hide the fact the phase noise will spoil the appearance on narrow plots. eg an IMD test on a 20kHz span would look very noisy.
Anyone know what he means by "IP3"??
Hi That was my post above
I haven't seen a decent technical review of this analyser yet which is kind of frustrating. My background is that I'm an RF designer and for the last 20+ years I've always had access to the very best spectrum analysers at my place of work.
The products we design require the very best analysers available and so I'm quite clued up on how to evaluate a spectrum analyser in terms of its basic performance requirements. But sadly none of the guys these get sent to for review seem to do these basic tests. So I'm only left with the manufacturer's datasheet.
However, I guess any regular RF tests would show that the Rigol has some very real limitations in terms of spurious free dynamic range and maybe this isn't a fair comparison on an instrument that only costs $1500 new. Quite a remarkable price!
The areas I would be most concerned about would be the spurious free dynamic range (above DANL) on a basic IP2 and IP3 test across various RBW and attenuator/preamp settings.
Also I'd be slightly concerned about internal spurious performance and rejection of external spurious and the quality of the RF attenuators at the front end.
Obviously it won't offer lab grade performance in these areas but for most home users and field technicians this analyser would probably be a better choice than an older HP analyser. Few people will really need or appreciate the difference in performance against a high end analyser and it does have the advantage of a modern user interface and is highly portable and presumably has a reasonable warranty period