Hi All!
The Siglent SDG1000 Series AWGs are also sold (albeit for a lot more money) by LeCroy as WaveStation. The only difference between the Siglent original and the LeCroy rebadge is the color (the LeCroy is in black), the numbering of the outputs (Siglent is Ch2 left/CH1 right while LeCroy is vice versa) and the lack of the counter functionality in the LeCroy.
Owners of the Siglent SDG1000 will certainly know that there is no official download for firmware updates on the Siglent website. A firmware update has to be requested by email to Siglent in China, which may or may not yield in a response. Even worse, there is also no mention if a new firmware variant comes out.
On the other side, those that paid an insane amount of money for the LeCroy rebadge can at least find firmware updates on the LeCroy website.
The question so far was if a Siglent SDG1000 can simply be flashed with the LeCroy firmware, and if so, will the AWG still work. Well, as I found out today the answer to this is 'yes' and 'yes'.
I have a Siglent SDG1020 which I have to admit wasn't my best investment, and amidst the disappointment with its performance I thought 'what the hell', downloaded the latest WaveStation firmware from the LeCroy website and flashed it into my SDG1020. My SDG1020 is still grey/beige and not black, but aside from that everything works fine. As expected I lost the counter functionality (which was crap anyways) but the GUI fonts and colors seem to be a bit nicer, and Ch1 is now on the left and Ch2 on the right. The signal output is as good or bad as before (the terrible jitter is still there), but all waveforms work fine and the output levels seem fine, too. The only issue I noticed that in the info pane the model number is now empty, probably because I have an SDG1020 (20MHz) while the Wavestations are SDG1010, SDG1025 and SDG1050 (10MHz, 25MHz and 50MHz) so there is no equivalent LeCroy model number.
The generator is still crap but at least I now have a more reliable source for firmware updates. And I guess reverting to Siglent firmware will be just as easy.