Any suggestions what to test thats missing from a MSOX3104, what I used at my different jobs for the past 14 years or so?
I have great sympathy for people who are just content with what they have – and only having what they really need. Requirements for T&M gear in general (and DSOs in particular) can vary widely, depending on the tasks on hand. And of course, why should an instrument that met your requirements 14 years ago not still be the tool of choice today, as long as your requirements and expectations haven’t changed during all these years?
Yet it sometimes cannot hurt to reconsider the requirements, otherwise one might miss some opportunities to make life easier. My Review & Demo thread contains lots of examples of what even a lowest end analytical scope can do nowadays:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/sds800x-hd-review-demonstration-thread/What about 12-bit resolution and a nice vertical zoom implementation as demonstrated in the chapters “Pulse Response”, “Vertical Zoom Demo”, “Probe Bandwidth” and “Zoom Expectations”?
And wouldn’t it be nice sometimes to have true 500 µV/div full resolution sensitivity, instead of just 4 mV/div and everything below that just fake, as demonstrated in “True Vertical Sensitivity”?
Could it help sometimes to have a low noise instrument with <2.4 nV/√Hz voltage noise when 50 ohm terminated as demonstrated in chapters “Noise & Spurs”, “Noise Density” and “Noise Density 2” as well as “ Granular Noise”?
Is History something useful, where you can find up to 80000 past trigger events (records), play them back and analyze them to your heart’s content using all the tools the scope has to offer? Look at “History & Sequence Mode”.
What about deep measurements, which have deep memory as a prerequisite? Sections “Counting Pulses” and “Deep Measurements” give some examples of tasks that cannot be completed with short memory and measurements on heavily decimated data.
Aren’t the small Histicons in the measurement statistics convenient, as demonstrated in chapter “Measurement Histograms” and many other sections where automatic measurements are used?
You might value measurement Trend plots at times – wouldn’t Track plots be very useful as well, as they allow you to clearly visualize frequency and phase modulated signals as demonstrated in “Measurements 2 (Trend/Track)”?
Wouldn’t it sometimes be nice to be able to make accurate measurements? For very low frequencies and DC we can pull out a (good) DMM, but is it really necessary if you can have a DSO with 0.5% DC-accuracy, as confirmed in “DC Check”?
When I still worked with analog CROs, I made sure to have one with trigger signal output, where I could connect an 8-digit frequency counter, so that I’ve always been able to know the exact signal frequency, as it was important for many of my tasks. That’s become a habit and since trigger signal outputs were never very common and completely went out of fashion at one point, I wouldn’t accept any scope without a permanently visible precision frequency counter, like the 7 digits in any contemporary Siglent. Also mentioned in the “Counter”-section and numerous examples can be found throughout the Review thread.
4 highly sophisticated math channels with formula editor allow various experiments as well as extensive data conditioning (not only) for the FFT.
A deep (2 Mpts) FFT in turn allows good frequency resolution, and it’s all the more useful if we can have four FFTs at the same time as demonstrated in some of the noise measurements. A high dynamic range of up to 100 dB as demonstrated in “FFT Dynamic range” should also be welcome.
What about a powerful Frequency Response Analysis (Bode Plot) with up to 3 channels up to 120 MHz and >100 dB dynamic range, as demonstrated in “Bode Plot at a glance” and “Bode Plot Example”? That’s for free, by the way, not part of an expensive Power Analysis package.
Maybe the two custom probe definitions would be more convenient than a bunch or predefined probe factors, see “Custom Probe Factors”?
Of course it would not be fair to compare a $700,- instrument like the SDS824X HD to any of the Keysight MSOX3000 series, because it naturally lacks sample rate, bandwidth, 50 ohm inputs and active probe interfaces. But other than that...