New Rigol DS1054Z oscilloscope

[David Hess]

Indeed, that circuit not only that it has horrible ringing and ugly asymmetric transient response, but it also has 500 ps only for the falling edge. The rising edge is about 2 ns, nothing spectacular. 

Only one clean and fast edge, rising or falling, is needed to test transient response (unless the oscilloscope has asymmetrical response which can happen but indicates a major problem) and most reference level pulse generators are only designed to create one clean and fast edge polarity at a time.  The PG506 has separate outputs for positive and negative edges.

The CMOS output can be cleaned up by using either an open drain output (tri-state output for fast logic like LVC) with an external pull-up or pull-down resistor acting as a shunt termination or a fast low capacitance diode or cascode transistor can be used to disconnect a totem-pole CMOS output from the shunt termination.  The later is how the old NBS (National Bureau of Standards) design works which is duplicated by the PG506.

[Fungus]

Curiosity: What's the rise time produced a simple mechanical switch with very short wires? 

[David Hess]

Curiosity: What's the rise time produced a simple mechanical switch with very short wires? 

The coaxial mercury relay in the Tektronix Type 109 has a rise time of 250 picoseconds.  It would be fun to test a mercury reed switch mounted coaxially inside of a brass tube or as part of a coplanar waveguide to see what kind of performance could be achieved.

The transition time is not easy to measure because of the low repetition rate and because while a sequential sampling oscilloscope would have the bandwidth, it would also need a delay line to produce a pretrigger.  That leaves using a rare random sampling oscilloscope or a modern expensive high bandwidth DSO.  On the other hand if well constructed, it should work great for testing 500 MHz and slower DSOs.

I know of someone who was working on something like this for high voltage pulse generation and with my random sampling oscilloscope, it took like 30 minutes to accumulate enough points to display the waveform.

Update: The forum software is dumb.  How do you *not* embed a hyperlink?  It is doing it automatically and I just want the link.

[BravoV]

Guys ... as contribution back to this community, look what I got there, the free DS1104Z-S vs my friend's DS1054Z that I helped him to procure it while ago. All this time I borrowed that DS1054Z a lot as I helped him in the "upgrade" it too, now he really hates me once he knew I have DS1104Z-S. 

Tell me what you need, and please, don't ask me to do teardown comparison, as the DS1054Z is brand new and still within warranty.

I can't promise though on the timeline, what I have in mind is to do head to head comparison at the 50Mhz to 100Mhz hack. Or any idea please just ask, I will consider it.

PS : Is it better to make this comparison at separate thread ? or just put them in this giant overcrowded thread ?

[yngndrw]

Guys ... as contribution back to this community, look what I got there, the free DS1104Z vs my friend's DS1054Z that I helped him to procure it while ago. All this time I borrowed that DS1054Z a lot as I helped him in the "upgrade" it too, now he really hates me once he knew I have DS1104Z. 

Tell me what you need, and please, don't ask me to do teardown comparison, as the DS1054Z is brand new and still within warranty.

I can't promise though on the timeline, what I have in mind is to do head to head comparison at the 50Mhz to 100Mhz hack. Or any idea please just ask, I will consider it.

PS : Is it better to make this comparison at separate thread ? or just put them in this giant overcrowded thread ?

The DS1104Z looks to have another "source" button on the front, I thought they were meant to be exactly the same apart from the bandwidth ?

Edit: On the UK Rigol site, the DS1054Z also has the extra "source" button so maybe it's a new addition: https://www.rigol-uk.co.uk/Rigol-DS1054Z-Digital-Oscilloscope-p/ds1054z.htm

The DS1***Z Plus on the site also has the source button in addition to a "LA" button just above it.

[2N3055]

That is a signal source button...
That probably means that DS1xxxZ-Plus is full MSO with digital not enabled, and that new DS1xxx(non plus) is actually DS1xxxZ-S that  has AWG hardware built in but it is not enabled....
That would be my guess.

[Fungus]

Guys ... as contribution back to this community, look what I got there, the free DS1104Z vs my friend's DS1054Z that I helped him to procure it while ago. All this time I borrowed that DS1054Z a lot as I helped him in the "upgrade" it too, now he really hates me once he knew I have DS1104Z. 

Technically it's exactly the same device.

(Although you appear to have option for signal generator on yours...)

I can't promise though on the timeline, what I have in mind is to do head to head comparison at the 50Mhz to 100Mhz hack. Or any idea please just ask, I will consider it.

The hack can be applied/removed at will.

The easiest way is to connect to the scope via telnet port 5555. All you need is an Ethernet cable.

You switch between 50/100Mhz with a single command.

// Remove all options
:SYSTem:OPTion:UNINSTall

// Install an option
:SYSTem:OPTion:INSTall RDxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Where xxxxxxxxxxxxx is a code generated by Riglol

PS : Is it better to make this comparison at separate thread ? or just put them in this giant overcrowded thread ?

A separate thread might be good.

[bitseeker]

Edit: On the UK Rigol site, the DS1054Z also has the extra "source" button so maybe it's a new addition: https://www.rigol-uk.co.uk/Rigol-DS1054Z-Digital-Oscilloscope-p/ds1054z.htm

The page says DS1054Z, but the photo is of a DS1104Z.

[yngndrw]

The page says DS1054Z, but the photo is of a DS1104Z.

Good spot ! That explains that - They must have just used a stock photo.

[BravoV]

The DS1104Z looks to have another "source" button on the front, I thought they were meant to be exactly the same apart from the bandwidth ?

My mistake, its DS1104Z-S , its the one that has AWG.


Watch the two white symbols (sin & square wave buttons) at the lower right of the screen.

[metrologist]

I shortened up my leads and went to a much larger cap, 50 ohm input terminated. A little cleaner setup and some exercising the switch seems to have improved repeatability.

[Fungus]

I shortened up my leads and went to a much larger cap, 50 ohm input terminated.

I'd go for lots of small caps in parallel. The idea is to reduce ESR/ESI.

(lots of larger caps in parallel works too)

A little cleaner setup and some exercising the switch seems to have improved repeatability.

[Fungus]

Here's a question: Does anybody know if a genuine DS1104Z can be downgraded to a DS1054Z by doing a ":SYSTem:OPTion:UNINSTall"?

I imagine it can, I was just wondering. 

[BravoV]

Here's a question: Does anybody know if a genuine DS1104Z can be downgraded to a DS1054Z by doing a ":SYSTem:OPTion:UNINSTall"?

I imagine it can, I was just wondering. 

Noted ... will be in my test list. 

[metrologist]

I'd go for lots of small caps in parallel. The idea is to reduce ESR/ESI.
(lots of larger caps in parallel works too)

Thanks!

I also found the trigger output routed to CH2 through a short 50? terminated BNC interesting. A trigger event on CH1 produced a relatively fast edge (1.9 ns rt)  on the trigger output, after some delay (which seemed like a lot).

[JPortici]

"Trail"
i tried too with the trigger output going into terminated coax, a bit slower than yours

[Fungus]

I'd go for lots of small caps in parallel. The idea is to reduce ESR/ESI.

Thanks!

Ceramic caps of course... for fastest response.

And cut the legs as short as possible.

[IAmBack]

Our hero' firmware download link vanished from the following page:

http://int.rigol.com/Support/SoftDownload/3

Weird...

[RoGeorge]

The following link seems to always point to the latest version of DS1000Z firmware:
http://beyondmeasure.rigoltech.com/acton/fs/blocks/showLandingPage/a/1579/p/p-0019/t/page/fm/0

[metrologist]

What is the expected external trigger signal delay? I'm getting 350 ns. I have not seen specs on the ext trigger output, nor signal levels...

I bumped up the memory depth and forced a trigger - external trigger routed to CH1 input through 50 ohm termination (and I forgot to change to 1X).  Maybe someone can verify the trigger output on a nicer scope?

[David Hess]

What is the expected external trigger signal delay? I'm getting 350 ns. I have not seen specs on the ext trigger output, nor signal levels...

The delay for the trigger output is high compared to an oscilloscope with an analog trigger simply because triggering happens after the pipelined digitizer and time has to be spent doing digital signal processing to qualify the trigger even if it is a simple edge trigger.  The trigger output also has considerable trigger jitter caused by the granularity of the DSP clock cycle.

[yngndrw]

The HMCAD1511 ADC used in these scopes has a pipeline delay of 128ns on its own, so 350ns doesn't sound unreasonable:
http://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data-sheets/hmcad1511.pdf
(See page 5, the pipeline delay in single channel mode is 128 clock cycles at 1GHz. In quad channel mode it's 32 cycles, but presumably that is at 250MHz and therefore the same time period.)

[mmprestine]

Anyone running the current v00.04.04.01.01  2016/09/14 firmware?  I updated today from an older 4.03...something and now I get random reboots and lockups.

[RoGeorge]

Anyone running the current v00.04.04.01.01  2016/09/14 firmware?  I updated today from an older 4.03...something and now I get random reboots and lockups.

None of these so far, board version 0.1.1. The FW was updated this months with the version 00.04.04.01.01 from 2016/09/14, but didn't used it more then 10-20 hours yet.

How often does the reboot/lockup happen?

[yngndrw]

I'm running v00.04.04.SP1 which should be the latest (Brand new scope, was updated and dispatched by Telonic on Tuesday) on board version 0.1.4 and haven't seen any lock-ups or reboots - Not that I've been using it for very long.

This version is listed as the latest as of the 24th of Oct, so might want to try this:
http://www.rigol-uk.co.uk/Get-the-latest-RIGOL-firmware-p/firmtest.htm