After spending most of yesterday replacing the hard drive with a SSD and fighting with a RAM problem (and thanks a lot Agilent for hot-glueing the RAM modules to the mainboard
) the scope is now up and running, including the latest firmware modified to enable some of the options. So far so good
However, I also was quickly reminded again how poor the UI of these scopes was and how limited and simple even the advanced options were. It's been a very long time when I last used one of these scopes (at work we've mostly Agilent/Keysight Infiniiums running Windows 7 which have a much improved UI), but now that I'm sitting in front of one of these scopes again the old complaints are back. Even the latest software for these scopes (5.71 from 2009) still looks and feels like a Windows 95 application. The touch screen can't hide the fact that the UI was designed for mouse control, and a mouse is required for most settings as the 8.4" screen is too small to operate many parts of the UI sensibly. Early DSO9k/90k scopes which run XP use the same UI, but thanks to their large screen the UI becomes much more useable without a mouse. But comparing it with my LeCroy scopes from the same era which have a true touch UI and better options this feels like ten steps backward, not just in the user interface department.
Having said that, the scope runs fine now, and I even managed to enable the 128M sample memory which is nice. Also, the hardware is solidly built (typical HPAK), and (aside from the glued-in RAM) modestly maintenance friendly. The PSU seems to be a Lambda Vega 450 which is a current industrial PSU platform.
My 600MHz 54831D is about 800MHz 3dB point in real time sampling, but exceeds 1.2GHz in equivalent time.
Are you sure? The -3dB point is determined by the analog front end, and should be independent on the sample mode.
Thanks to a forum member's help all options have been enabled.
I guess it's the same member that hooked me up
Many thanks for that (he should know!)
I did also replace the PATA HDD with a PATA SSD: it's still slow to boot, taking a minute or so for the scope screen to appear, but definitely significantly better. The motherboard isn't anything to write home about, quite underpowered in fact. I think the 8000 might benefit from a better resolution touch screen, not sure what the mobo capabilities are.
The DSO8k/80k hardware has been improved a lot from the old 54800 Series. The mobo is a (for that time) modern intel D915GUX (later replaced by an AdLink M880) LGA775 (P4/Celeron) mainboard with PCIe interface. Mine came with a 2.93GHz Celeron (64bit) and 1GB DDR2-533 RAM (2x 512MB, as I said glued in), which I replaced with 2x 1GB DDR2-800.
The display is a 8.4" XGA (1024x768) touch screen instead of the 8.4" VGA (640x480) non-touch display in the 548xx Series. However, the touch screen doesn't help much as hitting some of the very small UI elements on the small 8.4" screen is still a challenge, which means you still need a mouse.
The hard drive in the DSO8k/80k is a SATA (150Mbps) 2.5" hard drive (in mine it was a 40GB Fujitsu MHV, which like most of these drives has already started to develop bad sectors). I replaced it with an 80GB intel SSD 530 I had laying around. The mobo has 4 SATA ports of which two are used (one for the HDD, another one for the slimline CDROM drive which is a PATA drive connected to SATA via a brigde board).
The sampling subsystem and the PCI interface adapter has changed as well (and both are now more reliable than on the 548xx). Also gone is the separate PCI graphics card with the antique C&T 65545 GPU for the scope application, the DSO8k/80k use the i915 GMA900 graphics in the mainboard's chipset, and connect to the touchscreen via a PCIe2x-to-LVDS adapter card. I haven't done any tests but it seems you can now run dual monitor configs (with the external monitor using a different resolution), however the scope app seems to only run in fullscreen mode.
The network interface that's on the mainboard is a 10/100Mbps NIC only, however since there's a free PCIe 1x slot a fast Gbps network adapter can be plugged in (I already ordered one).
I installed the 89600A VSA software but it did not recognoze the scope. Could well be a firewall issue as the scope app seems to expect the Windows firewall to be disabled (which is a really poor idea) and I re-enabled it and just unblocked the port requests from the scope software.
Now that I have the scope up and running I might even do some performance comparison against my LeCroy WaveRunner 64Xi which is of the same class, same vintage and similar price points (approx $14k for the DSO8064A and $11k for the WR64Xi).