Quote from: tszaboo on Today at 07:10:47I believe the new-ish way of doing TDR is with a VNA, not with a scope. Which is of course a completely different sort of instrument than what you had in mind, with it's own different challenges. But maybe take a look at those instruments, because some of them will do TDR, and the 1 port devices are not particularly expensive (Cheaper than a car) even at 18GHz.
Well if I only needed to extract S-parameters and see how transmission lines behave in frequency domain I would probably be looking at buying some cheaper VNA, but to see where problems exactly are on the line, analyze crosstalk points and maybe do eye diagram analysis I think sampling scope is the best bet for me. There are some high end Siglent VNAs that have TDR option available but they also cost pretty penny :/
Quote from: tggzzz on Today at 08:41:35Quote from: dr_chernobyl on Yesterday at 23:38:58Basic specs that I was looking for was around ~20ps incident pulser risetime and 20-30GHz sampling head bandwidth. The caveat is it should be as cheap as possible, ...
Those are mutually exclusive constraints Alternatively, define what "cheap" means in this context
Don't forget to include the cost of the cables and the calibration loads, including not exceeding the number of acceptable mating cycles
If your company is going to be relying on the results, don't forget to include whatever servicing/calibration is required by your customers.
Consider hiring the equipment.
Yeah I know, but explain that to the management
I understand their philosophy that we need to do things as cheap as possible and rely on simulations because in their mind simulations on modern software are flawless but I feel blind without actually measuring stuff from time to time and doing some experimental verification of simulation results....
And hiring is not an option because my team lead and I would like to set up our own small lab for testing, we tend to need the results ASAP, renting is a bit of a hassle.
DSA8200 really caught my eye because of so much capability in one instrument, and my definition of cheap in this context is getting best bang for my buck. Older instruments may be cheap but they once were the best you could buy, and that would be enough for me.