Wavejet wavesurfer waverunner are iwatsu hardware... Lecroy crapware.
My problem was with a Waverunner 104mxi. Thats a 32000$ scope...
I spent 3 full days trying to troubleshoot an fpga design, that, according to modelsim should work right, but according to the scope did not... The scope was lying. It would tell you it triggered but on some traces it would show old data... Or it would lose the time alignment between traces. Or you would zoom in, zoom out and have no clue what you are looking at, or lose the trace data altogether.
I was ready to take a hammer to it.
I shipped it back to them and i 'modified' ( with a sharpie permanent marker ) the 'oy' in their logo to 'ap,
I made a 15 page presentation with screenshots and procedure to follow to reproduce the problems. After numerous phonecalls they finally came back 'we cant reproduce these problems. So i sat on the phone for hours telling them , like talking to a lttle kid, "hit factory default. Connect probe to calibrator output. Set trigger to single , rotate this knob one click left , move corsor to center, rotate knob one click right. What do you see ?". Deafening silence for a minute and then a sheepish answer " ah yes... Thats not right.
And then they go off for 2 months and send me a "beta" that i have to test for them ?
No more. I refuse to touch these machines. They are unreliable.
And there are tons of other annoyances with them . Every few minutes they need to 'calibrate' a process that takes 5 to 10 seconds' . Can't you guys design an a/d that does not drift so bad ?
Try troubleshooting a system when ever so often the machine is blind because it has to do something. It is really getting on your nerves after a while.
Calibrating .. Triggering .. Acquiring .. No wait calibrating again... Aaaargh ! Just show me a goddams signal you pile of assorted junk in a box.
And the amount of times the spftware locks up is incredible. It suffices to spin the timebase knob fast forward and backwards and its little brain freezes ! Remeber on an analog scope you would grab the timebase knob and just wing it until you got to see your signal ? Cant do that on the lecroy .. It'll crash and you have to reboot it...
And they cant even desogn a proper rotary encoder algorithm either. If you use one of the scroll buttons to move the trace on the screen it either crawls like a snail and after a few clicks becomes a racehorse that puts the viewport at the far end. It is aggravating to work with.
And as for theirprobes... The tips break off very easily , you pull the grabber pff and the pin comes out off the probe and sits in the grabber with no way to pull it out or get the grabber back on the probe.
All their current probes are made by hioki and sold at 5x the price.
I really hate those machines. Whenever there is a convention and there is a lecroy booth i walk in and go spin all the knobs on all the machines so they lock up for all to see.
The rohde and schwarz scope is pretty nice. I had one on demo for a few weeks and sort of 'beta'd it for a while. They some kinks to work out. The hardware is solid. The software is solid too in terms of not locking up , but it has too many menu layers. The triggering alone requires no less than three different windows to be open. You set level and select channels in one , assign trigger co dition ( ch1 low , ch2 rising, ch3 no care and ch4 high ) in another and if you need tot apply glitch or runt trigger thats another window open.
Some things are abit awkward too. Remove a trace ? Ehhhh stange..
Normally you assime that if you push the vertical button the trace goes on, push it again it goes off. Not with RS. Push is on , push again is set parameters.. Only way to turn itoff is to take the mouse , go to the trashcan icon , click there then click on the trace you want to remove....
In other words : the scope basic operations are not all controllable through the knobs and dials on the frontpanel. On an agilent i very rarely need to grab the mouse. In fact the only times you need the mouse is when yo also need the keyboard.. Like entering a filename to save.. Or if you want to drag a specific measurement onto a signal , or draw a specific zoom area. Anything else is done through the front panel. This is important on bench.. You already have a ton of boards , wires and other muck on the bench and now you need to make room for a keyboard and a mouse too.... Thats a bit much , especially if there is already a computer on the bench with kbd/mouse.
But overall the RS is a solid design. Give them some time. Theyll get there. Their a/d is really good, and they are the only scope that has a true 1mv per div without a 1 division noiseband on screen !
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