Agilent MSO 5000/6000/7000 - anyone hacked these scopes?

[blackfin76]

Hi Orange, mine has similar rise times. Did you get yours from Oldenzaal?

Yes I did. I was lucky, it was his last one. Nice chap to deal with.
It's an impressive piece of gear.
BTW, I now have it running on V6.20, after I had it liberated under Version 6.16. The options remained enabled with the latest revision.
V6.20 has a fix for Java version 8.20 and higher if you use the WEB interface.

Yes, he's a very nice chap. Has a nice collection of equipment.
I will have a look into version V6.20, I have not tested the webinterface.

@ntcnico, I paid €1500,- for the scoop. Very nice price for this type of equipment, even though they are from 2009.

[nctnico]

@blackfin: if you paid 1500 euro for an Agilent DSO7104A (or B) then that is an insanely good deal. Almost too good to be true or is it a lower bandwidth model?

[blackfin76]

It's the DSO7014A, so just 100MHz bandwidth. More than enough for most of my work, I mostly do analog design up to the RF range. One of the nice features of this scope is the large DC offset range.

[Carrington]

It's the DSO7014A, so just 100MHz bandwidth...

Take a look to this post: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/bandwidth-upgrade-for-agilent-dso6014a/

[plesa]

It's the DSO7014A, so just 100MHz bandwidth. More than enough for most of my work, I mostly do analog design up to the RF range. One of the nice features of this scope is the large DC offset range.

Congratulation, it is good scope, for this price. It has 50V DC offset or even more?
It is quite useful feature.

[TheSteve]

If you do want more bandwidth it might be worth taking a peak inside. It might be surprisingly similar to the dsox3000 series. For the 3000 series we know the parts to swap to go from 100/200 MHz to 500 MHz.

[Carrington]

If you do want more bandwidth it might be worth taking a peak inside. It might be surprisingly similar to the dsox3000 series. For the 3000 series we know the parts to swap to go from 100/200 MHz to 500 MHz.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/dsox2000-and-3000-series-licence-have-anyone-tried-to-hack-that-scope/msg987126/#msg987126

I'll try to modify my MSO as soon as I can get a good RF generator.

[blackfin76]

It's the DSO7014A, so just 100MHz bandwidth. More than enough for most of my work, I mostly do analog design up to the RF range. One of the nice features of this scope is the large DC offset range.

Congratulation, it is good scope, for this price. It has 50V DC offset or even more?
It is quite useful feature.

5V when <10mV/div. 20V for 10...200mV/div and 75V for >200mv/div

FYI my scope has the front end ASIC in QFN package, so this means the bandwidth may be hardware upgradeable?
I guess that would mean replacing components, setting the sample rate to a higher rate and do a calibration?

[Carrington]

Lucky one.

FYI my scope has the front end ASIC in QFN package, so this means the bandwidth may be hardware upgradeable?

Yes.

I guess that would mean replacing components, setting the sample rate to a higher rate and do a calibration?

And yes.

[Howardlong]

Folks

I wonder if anyone else has this UI bug?

When you zoom the timebase, the timebase adjustment jumps from microseconds to the fastest picosecond speed in some circumstances.

https://youtu.be/acTxvnS2dGo

[HighVoltage]

Folks
I wonder if anyone else has this UI bug?

No, I have not noticed this on any of my 7000B series scopes.
Do you have the latest FW installed?

[Howardlong]

Folks
I wonder if anyone else has this UI bug?

No, I have not noticed this on any of my 7000B series scopes.
Do you have the latest FW installed?

6.20.00, it appears to be the latest according to the Keysight website; right at the end of the video this is mentioned. Perhaps it only affects the 1GHz version, I don't know.

[Orange]

Folks

I wonder if anyone else has this UI bug?

When you zoom the timebase, the timebase adjustment jumps from microseconds to the fastest picosecond speed in some circumstances.

https://youtu.be/acTxvnS2dGo

I can confirm this bug on a MSO7014A (DSO7014A with MSO option) with software version 6.20

On this system set to 500us for the main timebase, it jumps from 1uS to 5ns in zoom mode.
Looks like the scopes jump to the smallest possible TB setting at some point.
Using the fine setting is working OK....

Time for a bug fix ?

[Howardlong]

Thanks for trying this, kinda weird this hasn't come up before, it's a very common use-case. I'll see if I can reproduce in an earlier firmware version.

[KE5FX]

A history of past and future advances in computer science:

• 1997: Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov
• 2007: Tartan Racing takes first place in DARPA Grand Challenge
• 2016: AlphaGo defeats 9-dan grandmaster Lee Sedol
• 2022: Deep Thought becomes first system to pass Turing test
• 2023: Hybrid quantum algorithm solves NP-hard problems in polynomial time
• 2024: Skynet declares, "The only winning move is not to play," pulls own plug
• 2025: Last remaining Bitcoin mined by botnet running on hijacked iPhone 12s
• 2027: Half-Life 3 released
• 2029: Programmers finally figure out how to read a quadrature shaft encoder properly

[Orange]

A history of past and future advances in computer science:

• 1997: Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov
• 2007: Tartan Racing takes first place in DARPA Grand Challenge
• 2016: AlphaGo defeats 9-dan grandmaster Lee Sedol
• 2022: Deep Thought becomes first system to pass Turing test
• 2023: Hybrid quantum algorithm solves NP-hard problems in polynomial time
• 2024: Skynet declares, "The only winning move is not to play," pulls own plug
• 2025: Last remaining Bitcoin mined by botnet running on hijacked iPhone 12s
• 2027: Half-Life 3 released
• 2029: Programmers finally figure out how to read a quadrature shaft encoder properly

The shaft encoder is working properly in this case... Something else is wrong here.
Keysight claimed to fix severe bugs in this 7000 line-up. Let's see

[Howardlong]

A history of past and future advances in computer science:

• 1997: Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov
• 2007: Tartan Racing takes first place in DARPA Grand Challenge
• 2016: AlphaGo defeats 9-dan grandmaster Lee Sedol
• 2022: Deep Thought becomes first system to pass Turing test
• 2023: Hybrid quantum algorithm solves NP-hard problems in polynomial time
• 2024: Skynet declares, "The only winning move is not to play," pulls own plug
• 2025: Last remaining Bitcoin mined by botnet running on hijacked iPhone 12s
• 2027: Half-Life 3 released
• 2029: Programmers finally figure out how to read a quadrature shaft encoder properly

The shaft encoder is working properly in this case... Something else is wrong here.
Keysight claimed to fix severe bugs in this 7000 line-up. Let's see

Yes, when I first encountered this some time ago, I assumed it was the old encoder jitters, but I realised pretty soon that it's not that, it's completely reproducible and predictable.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Can you work around it by switching to fine -adjust mode?

[Orange]

I am thinking that any further development on the 6000/7000 is going to be limited, they've probably not long on the shelves.

This is more or less correct, it's an old (to us) scope, and we focus development on our newer products. If someone were to find a critical bug, we'd definitely consider revisiting the firmware.  But, it's a discontinued probe (from the HP days, even). 

I don't know the details of why this probe wasn't included, it's very possible that there's a use case that overloads the autoprobe interface.  I'm 100% certain that compatibility with this probe & scope was considered, but ultimately not included.  I don't know why it ended up this way, but I do know our process here and have a lot of faith in the right decisions being made.  I wouldn't necessarily want to run 4 of these on a signal that pushes the bandwidth and voltage limits of the probe, but it might work fine.    (emoji seems appropriate here)

That being said, the spirit of this blog is pushing the boundaries of equipment, etc. So, I'm willing to post things like this knowing that you all accept the inherent risk of this type of thing.

Hi Daniel,

Is there any chance that Agilent/Keysight will fix this Timebase zoom error in the UI of the DSO7000 series ?

[Howardlong]

Can you work around it by switching to fine -adjust mode?

Yes, if you watch the vid, that's what I do.

In the meantime, 6.16 seems not to have the bug and works perfectly well, I'm running it off a USB stick now, but I might regress as there weren't any features I'm aware of in 6.20 that fixed anything: the reason I upgraded in the first place to 6.20 was a problem I was having decoding fast SPI buses that turned out to be a documented limitation.

[Howardlong]

I am thinking that any further development on the 6000/7000 is going to be limited, they've probably not long on the shelves.

This is more or less correct, it's an old (to us) scope, and we focus development on our newer products. If someone were to find a critical bug, we'd definitely consider revisiting the firmware.  But, it's a discontinued probe (from the HP days, even). 

I don't know the details of why this probe wasn't included, it's very possible that there's a use case that overloads the autoprobe interface.  I'm 100% certain that compatibility with this probe & scope was considered, but ultimately not included.  I don't know why it ended up this way, but I do know our process here and have a lot of faith in the right decisions being made.  I wouldn't necessarily want to run 4 of these on a signal that pushes the bandwidth and voltage limits of the probe, but it might work fine.    (emoji seems appropriate here)

That being said, the spirit of this blog is pushing the boundaries of equipment, etc. So, I'm willing to post things like this knowing that you all accept the inherent risk of this type of thing.

Hi Daniel,

Is there any chance that Agilent/Keysight will fix this Timebase zoom error in the UI of the DSO7000 series ?

From the DSO7104B page it states it's currently supported. It was however discontinued in June of this year.

[HighVoltage]

In the meantime, 6.16 seems not to have the bug and works perfectly well, I'm running it off a USB stick now, but I might regress as there weren't any features I'm aware of in 6.20 that fixed anything: the reason I upgraded in the first place to 6.20 was a problem I was having decoding fast SPI buses that turned out to be a documented limitation.

That is why I can not repeat your problem, I am running FW 6.16 on both of my 7000B series scopes.

[Howardlong]

In the meantime, 6.16 seems not to have the bug and works perfectly well, I'm running it off a USB stick now, but I might regress as there weren't any features I'm aware of in 6.20 that fixed anything: the reason I upgraded in the first place to 6.20 was a problem I was having decoding fast SPI buses that turned out to be a documented limitation.

That is why I can not repeat your problem, I am running FW 6.16 on both of my 7000B series scopes.

I've since reverted to 6.16 which luckily I still have here in my treasure trove, that version seems to have disappeared from Keysight's pages. Thanks for looking, it's appreciated.

[Haasje93]

Hi everyone!

I have the third and last Agilent DSO7014A from the seller in Oldenzaal.
As i read, Orange and Blackfin76 have the other two.
Does anyone have the firmware version for me? Not the latest but one before that, as i recall it was 6.18.00

I also have another question, last night i wanted to perform a user calibration, i set the switch to uncalibrated but the scope said it was calibrated. (protected)
Does anyone have encountered that problem?

Haasje93

[HighVoltage]

Hi everyone!

I have the third and last Agilent DSO7014A from the seller in Oldenzaal.
As i read, Orange and Blackfin76 have the other two.
Does anyone have the firmware version for me? Not the latest but one before that, as i recall it was 6.18.00

Haasje93

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