Ultra Station Windows software
This is probably the darkest area in this review. As it's the case with most other AWGs, Rigol does offer some Windows software (called "Ultra Station") which supports the DG1000z, DG4000 and DG5000 Series of AWGs. As I was pretty disappointed by the primitive Siglent EasyWave software which came with my SDG1020 and which can barely be even considered a demonstration program, I was really hoping that Rigol Ultra Station fares a bit better. Testing Ultra Station beforehand was not possible as it uses the AWG as some kind of dongle and won't start without one connected.
To make this short, my hopes were crushed. The first thing is that the Ultra Station, while being only 12MB in size, doesn't work on its own but also requires a program called "Ultra Sigma" which is a 500MB+ large package that provides the communication layer between Ultra Station and the instrument. On top of that Rigol also wants the National Instruments NIVISA package. The thing is that apparently in Rigol's world, people ever use National Instrument's interface and software only, others like Agilent don't seem to exist. Since I had Agilent's VISA suite installed to use my Beiming USB-to-GPIB adapter, I got an error message during installation saying that this VISA is incompatible and that some libraries have to be renamed which is pretty daft.
Anyways, after installation I connected my DG1062z via USB to the computer and started Ultra Station (version 00.01.03.01) through Ultra Sigma (version 00.01.06). After the splash screen I was then greeted with a message telling me that full functionality will expire in 15 days and that after that I will only be able to use basic functionality. Apparently Rigol wants users to pay for the more advanced parts of their software. Really, Rigol?
Then there is the rest. Ultra Station is a another good example why Chinese software has such a strong and well deserved reputation of being crap. In some areas it is slightly better more useful than what Siglent provides for their AWGs, though, but nevertheless it's still a horrible piece of software. For example, there is no full screen mode. None. Zero. So sitting in front of a large monitor helps nothing as Ultra Station is windowed only, wasting a lot of screen estate which could have been very useful for a program that is used to edit waveforms. Then there are other things, like that when creating a new waveform the default selected sample memory is only 16k and not 8M (which has to be entered manually). Or that after setting the parameters (sample memory, sample rate, voltage range) there is no way to alter the settings later on. The menu bar is ugly and unintuitive. The optional "full functionality" that was talked about in the splash screen (like various filters and maths) is nice, but it's not groundbreaking, and considering how awfully poor this program is and that the DG1062z is already pretty expensive, I think it's quite brazen to ask customers to pay again for that mess.
The good thing is that the software works, though, at least most of the time. Creating waveforms and sending them to the AWG worked reliably, but saving them into csv files, then reloading them and sending them to the AWG again often failed and resulted in some garbled signal.
Considering how good the UI of the DG1062z firmware is, Rigol should honestly be ashamed to complement a good piece of hardware with such crap software. AFter all, for AWGs waveform editors are not just a "nice to have" features but essential parts that for using the arbitrary waveform functionality. The Windows software really deserves the same attention as the hardware product. Rigol should dump this mess and hire someone who has heard from Windows Style Guides and knows about proper UX design, and have him do a proper replacement that is worthy of the hardware.