new killer scope in town - a true game changer from R&S - RTB2002 & RTB2004

[mikeselectricstuff]

Hey guys I just got the RTM 3004 scope for the week any suggestions on what should I test ??

UI responsiveness? May be a few drop tests? "How electrically robust is your is your meter oscilloscope"?

UI responsiveness is no better than the 2004 - some aspects are fine but others can be really annoying (compared to Keysight) - buttons and touches getting missed, especially when the scope gets busier.

[yashrk]

Hey guys I just got the RTM 3004 scope for the week any suggestions on what should I test ??

UI responsiveness? May be a few drop tests? "How electrically robust is your is your meter oscilloscope"?

UI responsiveness is no better than the 2004 - some aspects are fine but others can be really annoying (compared to Keysight) - buttons and touches getting missed, especially when the scope gets busier.

Most of the UI is done well but the zooming in on an signal is just better on Keysight. And UI does takes time to get used to.

[markb82]

Just got my RTB2004.  Has anyone else noticed a high pitch whine when the scope is in standby mode (mains plugged in, but scope off)?  It is rather loud compared to my working environment.

[kkessler]

Mine's completely silent when in standby

[markb82]

Mine's completely silent when in standby

Sounds like either a ceramic cap or inductor is vibrating in mine (probably on the power supply).  Has anyone experienced failures of the power supply?  (a different thread mentions that the RTB2000 series has seen power supply failures)

[markb82]

Not sure if this bug has been reported, but here goes.  The scope seems to have a sampling issue when you drop it down to 625 Msps.  See video for example:



Scope firmware is at 2.00.

To reproduce this:

1. Connect a scope channel to the probe compensation port.
2. Set sample time-scale to 2ms/div (this will cause the sample rate to be set to 625Msps).
3. Enable zoom and zoom in on the rising edge.
4. The rising edge will be dancing around a bit.
5. Back off to 1ms/div and the scope will show the proper rising edge (1.25Gsps).
6. Go back to 625Msps.
7. Enable either envelope or peak-detect, and now the rising edge moves forward by about 7ns.


P.S.  I really like this scope, so I hope it doesn't have to go back to get the power supply looked at.  Right now I'm just using the hard switch on the back of the unit when not in use.

[josema]

Just got my RTB2004.  Has anyone else noticed a high pitch whine when the scope is in standby mode (mains plugged in, but scope off)?  It is rather loud compared to my working environment.

Just got mine last week and I noticed the same noise. Not sure if it was normal. No failure on the power supply, though.

[maginnovision]

I have a launch unit in USA(120v, 60hz) and no noise.

[hwj-d]

Own an early one 230V 50Hz. Almost silent.

[0xdeadbeef]

I wonder if someone did an unbiased comparison of the RTB2K vs. the Lecroy Wavesurfer 3000 as they should be roughly in the same price range, both have a touch screen and comparable features and memory sizes.
The main technical difference seems 10bit (R&S) vs. 8bit (Lecroy) and 2.5 GSa/s (R&S) vs. 4 GSa/s (Lecroy) sampling rate - where I would honestly value the sampling rate higher.
E.g. from browsing the manual, the R&S seems to miss a complex trigger feature while the Lecroy has a "Smart Trigger" which allows at least a bit of complexity. But maybe I'm mistaken regarding the R&S.
I'm also not sure if the search functions of the R&S come close to the "WaveScan" feature of the Lecroys.
Then again, I used a Wavesurfer 3000 at work and found it to be quite a bit sluggish (compared to a bigger Lecroy) and some things to be annoying like it entering the roll mode early on higher time bases.
At least from the videos I saw, the GUI of the R&S seems to be a bit sleeker.

[markb82]

I wonder if someone did an unbiased comparison of the RTB2K vs. the Lecroy Wavesurfer 3000 as they should be roughly in the same price range, both have a touch screen and comparable features and memory sizes.
The main technical difference seems 10bit (R&S) vs. 8bit (Lecroy) and 2.5 GSa/s (R&S) vs. 4 GSa/s (Lecroy) sampling rate - where I would honestly value the sampling rate higher.
E.g. from browsing the manual, the R&S seems to miss a complex trigger feature while the Lecroy has a "Smart Trigger" which allows at least a bit of complexity. But maybe I'm mistaken regarding the R&S.
I'm also not sure if the search functions of the R&S come close to the "WaveScan" feature of the Lecroys.
Then again, I used a Wavesurfer 3000 at work and found it to be quite a bit sluggish (compared to a bigger Lecroy) and some things to be annoying like it entering the roll mode early on higher time bases.
At least from the videos I saw, the GUI of the R&S seems to be a bit sleeker.

That would be a good comparison, but the Wavesurfer 3000 has an active probe interface and 50 ohm termination, so it may be more directly comparable to the RTM3000 series (except for price?)?

0xbaadf00d

Edit:

Couple other differences is a lower res screen on the Wavesurfer and models all the way to 750 MHz.

[JPortici]

I wonder if someone did an unbiased comparison of the RTB2K vs. the Lecroy Wavesurfer 3000 as they should be roughly in the same price range, both have a touch screen and comparable features and memory sizes.
The main technical difference seems 10bit (R&S) vs. 8bit (Lecroy) and 2.5 GSa/s (R&S) vs. 4 GSa/s (Lecroy) sampling rate - where I would honestly value the sampling rate higher.
E.g. from browsing the manual, the R&S seems to miss a complex trigger feature while the Lecroy has a "Smart Trigger" which allows at least a bit of complexity. But maybe I'm mistaken regarding the R&S.
I'm also not sure if the search functions of the R&S come close to the "WaveScan" feature of the Lecroys.
Then again, I used a Wavesurfer 3000 at work and found it to be quite a bit sluggish (compared to a bigger Lecroy) and some things to be annoying like it entering the roll mode early on higher time bases.
At least from the videos I saw, the GUI of the R&S seems to be a bit sleeker.

- UI in the WS3k is slow as hell when record lenght is more than 100kpts
- Wavescan in the WS3k is a joke, very few parameters you can analyze (and trigger from), nothing you can't do with advanced triggers (slew rate, pulse lenght, ..) . Plus, with wavescan on the acqusition rate drops in the 10-100 wfm/s. That's because the scope acquires, analyze the acquisition, places markers and then rearm the trigger.
- touch screen is an ancient resistive type POS. very inaccurate, slow to react and if you press to do things like zoom the cursor jumps around. better use a mouse.

[0xdeadbeef]

Admittedly I really only used WaveScan in higher end Lecroys and not in the WS3K series but having e.g. hundreds of adjacent periods for analysis is something completely different than being able to trigger on a period.
I mean, it's not rocket science but it saved me from exporting data and running scripts on it in some cases.
And I don't care for a large deadtime if heavy analysis is done on the whole capture buffer and wouldn't want to sacrifice it for the pseudo-analog look of the Keysight DSOX scopes that can only perform analysis on the frame buffer. In the end, every scope has a deadtime during analysis. I understand that there are two different ideologies there and I'm clearly on the Lecroy side of it.
I also haven't problems with a resistive touchscreen. But agreed, when I (shortly) worked with scopes of the WS3K series, even things like zooming in felt slow.
My main gripe with the WS3K still is that it seems to enter roll mode in timebases where a higher end Lecroy with only slightly more memory but higher sample rate doesn't and I don't really get why.

Anyway: any remark on the trigger system of the RTB2K? Like I totally love the multi stage trigger system of higher end Lecroys and when I last played with the smart trigger of the WS3K it seemed to offer at least two conditions with a timing to allow something like triggering on the 2nd edge that occurs within 20ms or so. At least from reading the manual of the R2BK it's unclear to me if something like this could be achieved with the pattern trigger.

Admittedly I didn't really fully notice that the RTB2K doesn't support active probes. I guess this also means it can't automatically switch to 1:10 attenuation if you connect a probe? That's a bit of PITA as even my trusty old HMO2024 can do that. Not a total showstopper but a bit of meh.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Anyway: any remark on the trigger system of the RTB2K? Like I totally love the multi stage trigger system of higher end Lecroys and when I last played with the smart trigger of the WS3K it seemed to offer at least two conditions with a timing to allow something like triggering on the 2nd edge that occurs within 20ms or so. At least from reading the manual of the R2BK it's unclear to me if something like this could be achieved with the pattern trigger.

The RTM3K supports multiple edge triggers - it's possible these may find their way to the 2000

[0xdeadbeef]

Would be cool but I guess they might as well to keep as many as possible advanced feature exclusive to the RTM3K.
The RTM3K sure looks nice but it seems that about everything there costs twice as much as for the RTB2K.

[JPortici]

Admittedly I really only used WaveScan in higher end Lecroys and not in the WS3K series but having e.g. hundreds of adjacent periods for analysis is something completely different than being able to trigger on a period.
I mean, it's not rocket science but it saved me from exporting data and running scripts on it in some cases.
And I don't care for a large deadtime if heavy analysis is done on the whole capture buffer and wouldn't want to sacrifice it for the pseudo-analog look of the Keysight DSOX scopes that can only perform analysis on the frame buffer. In the end, every scope has a deadtime during analysis. I understand that there are two different ideologies there and I'm clearly on the Lecroy side of it.

I'm also more of a lecroy fan and i agree with everything you said, but facts are facts and the fact is that scope doesn't have the processing power it really needs to do the few things it can.
UI being so slow to react you could not be sure it recognized that you pressed a button or the touch panel.

I digged up the manual: what can you do with the wavescan for WS3K?
-Edge: Count edges. Coooool. with level per-edge. but i'm sure i can set up a window trigger (rising/falling erde but level inside window) for that and use search functions
-Runt: Runt pulse trigger already exist
-Non-Monothonic, this is admittely a bit harder to do with trigger
-Measurement mode. I liked this mode, apply a measurement per-element. but i can do the same in the keysight by using a math trace and displaying the measurement, which i found more useful to do in a couple of scenarios

but the real problem is that you miss a lot of acquisition, going from several thousand to a couple tens of. you're lucky if your problem shows up, but your chances to see it are reduced by a factor of 1000.
I found this to be a real problem.

Anyway back on topic: do these scope let you DISPLAY a measurement trace? for example, i've set up "frequency" measurement, "frequency" trace should show a horizontal segment on each wave cycle, the level of the segment is the frequency of the wave cycle

[2N3055]

Anyway back on topic: do these scope let you DISPLAY a measurement trace? for example, i've set up "frequency" measurement, "frequency" trace should show a horizontal segment on each wave cycle, the level of the segment is the frequency of the wave cycle

Picoscope does...And they now have something called "Deep measure" that seems to be doing lots of stuff like Wavescan...

[MikeP]

 Yesterday found a feature of the new 2.0 firmware. And it has an effect!

[mikeselectricstuff]

Anyway back on topic: do these scope let you DISPLAY a measurement trace? for example, i've set up "frequency" measurement, "frequency" trace should show a horizontal segment on each wave cycle, the level of the segment is the frequency of the wave cycle

Not as far as I can tell, on either the RTB2000 or RTM3000
The MSOX3104 can do this ( maths-> measure trend)

[JoHr]

Yesterday found a feature of the new 2.0 firmware. And it has an effect!

... in many cases keys dispappear when they are not available ...

[JPortici]

I know that the Keysight can, i did it while we had the loaner.
I know that the picoscope CAN do it, in fact i'm doing this while writing this post.


In this picture, i have two signals that should transmit the same information, one in the analog domain (0-5V) and one in the digital domain (0-100%) duty cycle.
The orange trace is a math trace with the formula 5*duty(B)/100
this is a very useful feature in both the pico and the keysight, i'd like to know if the RTB/RTM had that feature

(what's with the deep measurement thing? is it only on the new beta? i tend not to run the beta because i have a lot of crashes compared to zero with the stable application. also, if it's what i think it is, i suppose i won't need that as i'm using an older 2000A series with 48 kpts of memory, it always uses the full trace for decode+measurements)

[mikeselectricstuff]

The orange trace is a math trace with the formula 5*duty(B)/100
this is a very useful feature in both the pico and the keysight, i'd like to know if the RTB/RTM had that feature

No, AFAICS the R&S scopes don't have this facility

[2N3055]

(what's with the deep measurement thing? is it only on the new beta? i tend not to run the beta because i have a lot of crashes compared to zero with the stable application. also, if it's what i think it is, i suppose i won't need that as i'm using an older 2000A series with 48 kpts of memory, it always uses the full trace for decode+measurements)

DeapMeasure is only in beta so far.  It works by measuring few important params for every single period in buffer (or across all buffers) and creates statistic table. You can export it to XLS file directly and make statistical analysis. It has potential. We will see..

I have been using my Picoscope a lot lately. It's just much quicker for some things, and 24" screen is just awesome.... And math is very advanced. That helps a lot too... Also, custom probes are a fantastic thing...
All in all, while it cannot replace full blown scope all the time, it is well worth money I paid for it.

[JPortici]

DeapMeasure is only in beta so far.  It works by measuring few important params for every single period in buffer (or across all buffers) and creates statistic table. You can export it to XLS file directly and make statistical analysis. It has potential. We will see..

I have been using my Picoscope a lot lately. It's just much quicker for some things, and 24" screen is just awesome.... And math is very advanced. That helps a lot too... Also, custom probes are a fantastic thing...
All in all, while it cannot replace full blown scope all the time, it is well worth money I paid for it.

oooh.. very nice. That's one half of what wavescan does, indeed. The other half would be triggering on certain conditions.. which the pico can't do as it can only trigger on edges / windows of edges

Anyway, R&S: Take the hint

[2N3055]

oooh.. very nice. That's one half of what wavescan does, indeed. The other half would be triggering on certain conditions.. which the pico can't do as it can only trigger on edges / windows of edges

Well, my 3000 series has Edge, window, pulse width, window pulse width, dropout, window dropout, interval, logic, runt pulse...  It is not quite Wavescan, but it is pretty much equivalent to Zone trigger... :-)
And it has 512 Msamples memory.... As I said, very useful little thing....

Also, in fast acquisition mode, it can grab 10000 of acquisitions buffers (triggered) in 6 msec burst at 1GS/sec.
That is more than 1 million triggers per second .... That is without screen updates, of course, but you can do that and then do DeepMeasure on captured data across all 10000 buffers...

As analytic scope it is very useful.
Regards,

Sinisa