The front panel I ordered 2 months ago (5/9/17) finally arrived! Cheers me up a bit about this scope after that nearly-useless firmware update.
The first photo shows opening the box up. R&S have it sitting in there upside down. The box is nice and heavy, I'll give them credit for that. Plastic over the panel to protect from rubbing on the cardboard.
Then fitting on the scope. There is a small gap where the scope's white panel bezel plastic mates with the blue body plastic. The two plastic snaps on either side of the front panel "click in" to that gap just perfectly. At first I figured that is how it attaches, but things didn't seem quite right. The panel could slide up and down in the track. There was also still a considerable gap between the top of the panel and the scope bezel that could let in dust.
Hmmm. I studied the thing a bit more and it seemed to be molded/sized to fit around the scope bezel, which is what should be happening with a cover. Relying on the sage age-old advice of "it if doesn't fit force it; if it breaks it needed replacing anyway" I pushed a lot harder on the panel. Sure enough, the side panel plastic snaps popped out of the groove and instead clamped around and indentation in the blue body plastic, as the second photo shows.
In that photo you can see the panel snap is firmly "locked into" the groove between the white panel bezel and the blue body plastic, where it shouldn't be. When you push harder it pops out of the groove and then goes around the curved blue plastic to the right of where the panel snap is here. As far as I can tell there is no way to avoid this two-step process.
In the "that's not a bug, its a feature!" department there is the chance that R&S designed it this way to allow two different mounting positions for the panel, one forward of actually snapping over the screen. The fit of the panel snaps into the groove is so perfect it seems unlikely the mating happened by design chance. But I can't fathom what the purpose or use of having the panel sticking out a cm from the front of the screen would be.
With the installation figured out I can say I'm happy with the results. The new panel protects the scope screen quite nicely. The panel it is fairly sturdy. I bought the panel after becoming worried about scuffing of the (touch) screen from repeated in and out of the R&S case for the unit. Is it worth the $85 they charge (some small discount by logging in at Tequipment)? Absolutely not. Should you buy one? Definitely. It is cheap insurance compared to the cost of the scope to prevent bad things from happening to the screen in transport.
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Topic: new killer scope in town - a true game changer from R&S - RTB2002 & RTB2004 (Read 816031 times)