$5000 Electronics Lab Challenge

[SharpEars]

A MSO, for a $5000 lab, I would go for a 200MHz GW Instek or Rigol, $1500.

You can't beat a hacked Rigol scope for features for price...

[ez24]

wow a lot more responses than the other post and one from Dave   

I do not think no used has sunk in but just in case    there are some good deals on Power Designs PS

Also you can get good used equipment on eBay if you pay a premium for it and with a guarantee. 

This will be a fun thread and Dave, I think this would make a good video topic see 1,000 show for another idea.

Another idea once you pick your stuff - put wanted to buy here on each item stating that you want good stuff

[SharpEars]

I do not think no used has sunk in but just in case    there are some good deals on Power Designs PS

Power Designs is more of an analog fetish than a power supply you would actually use to power a random circuit. And yes, I've got one of the more rare 2020B units in full working order (after some TLC), as part of my absolutely insane power supply collection.

[OldSchoolTechCorner]

A MSO, for a $5000 lab, I would go for a 200MHz GW Instek or Rigol, $1500.
A <5G spectrum analyzer if you want to EMI or RF, I got my Signal Hound USB-SA44B for $550 (MSRP $900).
A 50MHz or lower differential probe for HV or floating measurements, $400.
A decent soldering iron + hot air gun, totally $200. Mine are a Weller WES51 and a Quick 957DW.
A proper accurate hand held multimeter, say, a Fluke 87V or Fluke 289, $350.
Some very fine tweezers and other hand tools, $100.
A LCR meter, expect $200. Mine is a Smart Tweezers ST5S, $300 (MSRP $400).
A data logger, such as an Analog Discovery, $150.
2 programmable power supply units, BK9110, $250*2=$500.
A fixed 5V/12V PSU, can be modified from an ATX PSU, $50.
A flashlight for board examine, $30.
Adapters, cables and attenuators (for RF): estimated to be $100.
An additional monitor for CAD software, $150.
A good engineering mouse for CAD software, $100.

Total: $4380.

This setup should be enough to do even a PhD dissertation in house, or run a consulting company.

Adding an additional $5k on software (Circuit Studio+a decent compiler+some specialty tools) licenses it will be a complete decent consult company's all equity.

Edit: In addition, a $250 cheap thermal camera could help. 3D printers don't make sense unless you make more cases than boards. Just outsource them.

Good list overall

I would add in good stable 8 digits, or higher universal frequency counter like a B&K Precision 1823A, or a used Fluke PM6685 with option C Optional Input Pre-Scaler. You can get them for around $500 bucks. A scope not a replacement for a good frequency counter. That Signal Hound USB-SA44B is pricey for a Software Defined Receiver (SDR).

[ez24]

I wonder if this could be split up into  new  and used sections ?

[awallin]

FWIW (i.e. not mich  ), here's a list of things from batronix:
1239  Rigol MSO2072A scope (2ch 70+hack MHz, 16ch LA)
840     Rigol DM3068  6 ½ digit DMM
102     UNI-T UT61E 4 ½ digit DMM
610    Siglent SPD3303X 3ch PSU
1495  Rigol DSA815-TG spectrum analyzer
165  Atten AT8502D soldering-iron + rework/hot-air
570  Siglent SDG2042X 2-ch 40MHz signal generator   
sum 5021

The 6.5-digit DMM is maybe debatable, two 4.5 digit meters might do fine.
Without a spectrum-analyzer you could get a nicer scope, a sperate LA, or a Tek MDO?
Just the 3-channel PSU is sometimes too little if you are prototyping more than once circuit at a time.
Microscope is missing... unless you have eysight for 0402 work without magnification     
solder-fume extraction might be nice if you're at home

[nbritton]

...general purpose R&D work.

$5k for an R&D lab? No, no, no.... just no.

Why? If you assume that 1% of the population are 'makers' then that's 70 million people who are looking for a R&D type environment. There has to be some reasonable compromises that can be made to make a $5k budget work... Dave already stated he could make a respectable lab for less than $5k. No one said it had to be Keysight, Tektronix, Fluke grade A gear, Rigol has some compelling offerings that fit into this budget.

[nbritton]

Rather than spending money on equipment I don't think you really know how to use according to your numerous other threads, how about you get that hands on learning experience that you said you're wanting by fixing your Tek 2213?

How am I every going to know how to use it if I don't have it to use it?

[OldSchoolTechCorner]

...general purpose R&D work.

$5k for an R&D lab? No, no, no.... just no.

Why? If you assume that 1% of the population are 'makers' then that's 70 million people who are looking for a R&D type environment. There has to be some reasonable compromises that can be made to make a $5k budget work... Dave already stated he could make a respectable lab for less than $5k. No one said it had to be Keysight, Tektronix, Fluke grade A gear, Rigol has some compelling offerings that fit into this budget.

We still need to know what you are planning on designing, or area of interest to better come up with a suitable list. Yes you can get respectable gear from others like Rigol, Siglent, GWinstek and a few others that will do the job just as well.

[nbritton]

I'm sure Fluke will have a scopemeter for $5000. Get one of those.

The only thing you would have in your entire lab is a scopemeter?

[AF6LJ]

This is a very entertaining thread 

Lets get serious;
Who actually needs a 6.5 digit DMM?
That is ridiculous for a 5K lab.

Forget the spectrum analyzer right off the top, buying a new SA that might be worth a damned on a good day when the sunshine was just the right shade of white would take too much of that 5K.

Don't even consider doing anything serious with RF.

Your big purchase will be your scope, so you need to decide if you really need a low end Mixed domain scope or just a DSO of reasonably good quality. From here on out the rest of your gear will be ether low-low end stuff or just low end stuff.

And one more thing....
Unless you Really-Really-Really, For Sure Need the precision, build your own bench power supplies, if you have the skill. I have worked places where they did exactly that until they got on their feet and could afford store bought supplies.

The other thing I don't see mentioned here; what about all those cables?
You going to buy them or make them. I prefer to make them since I am very good at it and know my workmanship is good to well beyond UHF by a decade or so.

If the challenge was 10K or even 7.5K it would be quite a bit easier, especially not knowing what the lab is going to be used for.

[G0HZU]

... to do WHAT??

In the real world this would be an excellent question... However, I  suspect that for some people the lab 'is' the hobby.

There does seem to be a bit of a herd mentality to all this... I get the impression that some people want a lab because it's seen as cool to have a decent lab? So maybe there are no immediate plans to make use of the gear for any particular task?
 
However, I would always recommend that you should only buy what you need but maybe I'm old and out of touch. It's certainly a lot different today with so much choice for decent used gear from the top brands at very low prices. If I was starting out again and someone gave me $5000 I think I'd spend it very differently to all the suggestions so far but then my interests are mainly RF and I prefer to buy used gear

[DimitriP]

Rather than spending money on equipment I don't think you really know how to use according to your numerous other threads, how about you get that hands on learning experience that you said you're wanting by fixing your Tek 2213?

How am I every going to know how to use it if I don't have it to use it?

If you can't decide what to get, how will you decide anything else once you have it ?
And if you are thinking of "I'll post my question on EEVBlog", well there you see my point.

From what i've seen so far, there are a lot of benches out there with a lot more "hardware" on the bench than there is "software" in front of it.

 
 

[nbritton]

Now I have lots of top notch calibrated equipment in excellent condition and still can't figure out what to use it (all) for?  The most complicated thing I've built is a high precision resistor divider to help with calibration.

So what you're trying to say is I should return everything and buy a Sony VPL-HW40ES projector instead?

[AF6LJ]

... to do WHAT??

In the real world this would be an excellent question... However, I  suspect that for some people the lab 'is' the hobby.

There does seem to be a bit of a herd mentality to all this... I get the impression that some people want a lab because it's seen as cool to have a decent lab? So maybe there are no immediate plans to make use of the gear for any particular task?
 
However, I would always recommend that you should only buy what you need but maybe I'm old and out of touch. It's certainly a lot different today with so much choice for decent used gear from the top brands at very low prices. If I was starting out again and someone gave me $5000 I think I'd spend it very differently to all the suggestions so far but then my interests are mainly RF and I prefer to buy used gear

Maybe we are old and out of touch...
Then again; my father's generation had the pick up line "Come back to my place and I'll show you my etchings."

Maybe the new pick up line is "Come back to my place; and we can hang out in the Lab.".

[nbritton]

I wonder if this could be split up into  new  and used sections ?

I changed the rules to allow for used equipment, provided it is less than 10 years old and it is readily available over the Internet and it is in good repair and you know its fair market value.

[Stupid Beard]

When I got back into electronics around this time last year, the first thing I bought was an oscilloscope. Because I spent 4 hours trying to track down some problem that turned out to be that I'd messed up clocking the PIC. The only way I had to verify that was with some hacky toggling of an I/O pin to generate a frequency within the range of the frequency counter on my ancient multimeter and then doing some math.

The second thing I bought was a BM257S, because I didn't trust my ancient multimeter and it was annoying me. Plus one multimeter is not enough.

The third thing I bought was a DP832, because I was pissed off messing around with wall warts and generally fudging things. I actually did start building my own bench PSU, but the last straw came when I caught myself thinking that testing the various parts of the PSU would be easier if I had an adjustable PSU. If I'm honest I kind of regret getting the DP832, but only insofar as I should have got something cheaper. I like the DP832 and use it a lot so I don't feel like it was a waste.

The fourth thing I bought was a new soldering iron, because my old butane iron was pissing me off.

The fifth thing I bought was a FY3224S cheap ass function generator, because I didn't need one much but every now and then I'd find myself wishing I had one.

There's been a few things that I got just because I wanted them, and there's a list as long as my arm of things I'd like to have just to play around with but don't really need and can't justify buying. But the vast majority of my purchases this year were driven by me doing something and then getting pissed off at not having the right tools.

If I had $5000 to spend on test gear I think the only thing I'd have done differently is get a really cheap power supply instead of the DP832 and then build extra ones myself. Maybe a better function generator too. The left over cash would get put aside for covering components and future things that piss me off.

[nbritton]

... to do WHAT??

In the real world this would be an excellent question... However, I  suspect that for some people the lab 'is' the hobby.

There does seem to be a bit of a herd mentality to all this... I get the impression that some people want a lab because it's seen as cool to have a decent lab? So maybe there are no immediate plans to make use of the gear for any particular task?
 
However, I would always recommend that you should only buy what you need but maybe I'm old and out of touch. It's certainly a lot different today with so much choice for decent used gear from the top brands at very low prices. If I was starting out again and someone gave me $5000 I think I'd spend it very differently to all the suggestions so far but then my interests are mainly RF and I prefer to buy used gear

We (I) don't plan to buy everything at once, I am simply trying to map out a budget so that I don't end up spending $20k on twenty oscilloscopes and a room full of redundant gear. I haven't even thought about what I want to build yet, there is no point in doing that until I have a lab with all the essentials. For me personally, I'm interested in computer electronics, but I'm equally fascinated by RF and analog... so I see little point in trying to specialize, I would like a general purpose lab that is designed for a maker (making is fundamentally R&D work).

[Howardlong]

This is a very entertaining thread 

Lets get serious;
Who actually needs a 6.5 digit DMM?
That is ridiculous for a 5K lab.

Forget the spectrum analyzer right off the top, buying a new SA that might be worth a damned on a good day when the sunshine was just the right shade of white would take too much of that 5K.

Don't even consider doing anything serious with RF.

Your big purchase will be your scope, so you need to decide if you really need a low end Mixed domain scope or just a DSO of reasonably good quality. From here on out the rest of your gear will be ether low-low end stuff or just low end stuff.


The other thing I don't see mentioned here; what about all those cables?
You going to buy them or make them. I prefer to make them since I am very good at it and know my workmanship is good to well beyond UHF by a decade or so.

Until quite recently I often questioned why you'd ever need a 6.5 digit DMM having spent the past 98% of my life without one, living perfectly well with 3 3/4 digits for many years thank you very much. For me it's not for absolute measurement, but for relative measurement: I do a fair amount of rework, and tracing down shorts, and badly behaving parts in circuit on a PCB is so easy with a high resolution DMM, and now I'd get frustrated without the resolution. But I'd agree, for absolute measurement the value of 6.5 digits still eludes me in a practical sense. I would not buy a 6.5 digit DMM new, or calibrated, there is just no value to me to be able to measure absolutely. The same is not true in the frequency domain though!

I'd agree about an SA. They're the most under utilised pieces of equipment in my lab, and I just made a count and have five of them, from 1.5GHz to 22GHz. The two VNAs I have get quite a bit more use than the SAs.

As well as the scope, get some decent tools especially soldering irons. I use four different irons almost daily for SMD rework, three Wellers (two 80W with different sized tips and a tweezer) and one bargain basement hot air iron from eBay which I'd have no hesitation in buying again. Well within three minutes on a rework job on a chip I'll use all four, and sometimes on the tweezer and hot air iron I'll swap bits.

If the OP must get an SA, what about a Tek MDO3014 and liberating its bandwidth (and everything else)?

I agree about cables, I have always made my own as a general rule... but they often do look pretty useless on a TDR compared to the professionally made high end brands like HP/Agilent Radiall etc., and for the VNAs above 100MHz or so I use the real thing for measuring stuff, no point in introducing more unknowns than you need to.

Buying everything at once as if that's it, there will be no more, doesn't sound right though. I didn't know I needed a 20GHz oscilloscope until a few months ago. Come to think of it, I probably still don't really need one, but being able to squeak at 10ps/div sure makes me feel good. Somebody call the doctor.

[ez24]

The OP did not mention if he wants to get into YT.  If so 6.5 digit DMM would be good for the wow factor.  If to show off the lab then bragging rights.  So they have a use 

I would add a bench multimeter, I wished I had one or more.

[georges80]

... to do WHAT??

In the real world this would be an excellent question... However, I  suspect that for some people the lab 'is' the hobby.

There does seem to be a bit of a herd mentality to all this... I get the impression that some people want a lab because it's seen as cool to have a decent lab? So maybe there are no immediate plans to make use of the gear for any particular task?
 
However, I would always recommend that you should only buy what you need but maybe I'm old and out of touch. It's certainly a lot different today with so much choice for decent used gear from the top brands at very low prices. If I was starting out again and someone gave me $5000 I think I'd spend it very differently to all the suggestions so far but then my interests are mainly RF and I prefer to buy used gear

We (I) don't plan to buy everything at once, I am simply trying to map out a budget so that I don't end up spending $20k on twenty oscilloscopes and a room full of redundant gear. I haven't even thought about what I want to build yet, there is no point in doing that until I have a lab with all the essentials. For me personally, I'm interested in computer electronics, but I'm equally fascinated by RF and analog... so I see little point in trying to specialize, I would like a general purpose lab that is designed for a maker (making is fundamentally R&D work).

Quite an "interesting" approach... "I haven't even thought about what I want to build yet, there is no point in doing that until I have a lab with all the essentials"

And you are hoping with this approach you wont a) spend $20K and b) not be stuck with a bunch of equipment you don't need. I must be in bizarro world 

I purchase equipment as I find a compelling need for it, not to dream up something to do because I have a piece of equipment laying dormant that requires that specific project to justify its existence in my lab...

My first post still stands and now is confirmed by your post above, imho the initiation of this thread is the old cart before the horse... but good luck with it. I'm guessing your background isn't as an EE?

Oh and just because Dave claims you could set up a decent lab for $5k doesn't make it so. Opinions of what is needed in a lab is driven by our own idea of what WE need for what WE are doing/interested in.

Of course if your goal is to have a 'neat lab' then I'm sure there will be a lot of suggestions of what to get even without knowing what you are going to use it for

cheers,
george.

[nctnico]

I haven't even thought about what I want to build yet, there is no point in doing that until I have a lab with all the essentials.

A four channel 100MHz scope with proper serial decoding options, a 30V 2A power supply and a >4.5 digits DMM are a good start besides a good soldering iron (be sure it allows to changes tips quickly) and a cheap hot-air station. From there you buy as needed. I'm still doing that but I also keep looking for good bargains as well. A couple of months ago someone on this forum wrote he wanted to get rid of a HP DC load; the price was right so I got it. I didn't really needed it at that time but in the past couple of days it has proven to be a good buy. For upcoming projects I look on Ebay for reasonably priced equipment which could be useful.

[Someone]

I haven't even thought about what I want to build yet, there is no point in doing that until I have a lab with all the essentials.

You can build and explore a huge part of the electronics world with just a multimeter, soldering iron, and some basic hand tools. Only then will it be possible to understand what you need or want to do. Just using test equipment requires a good understanding of the underlying electrical characteristics and problem solving skills as to what to use them for.

You don't buy all the equipment up front to start a band, first you learn how to play some instruments.

[ez24]

Make it easy and get one of these (blows the budget)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Agilent-Keysight-8-1-2-digit-3458A-Multimeter-w-certs-data-/262115113653?hash=item3d07473ab5:g:PAAAAOSwEetV-xg8


Maybe you could make a business of calibrating equipment with it.  There is a seller who sells calibration "things" and he use one to calibrate them.  There might be a market for this type of service vs a real lab calibration.  Try posting an ad on Craig's List to see if there is an interest in this?  You get a lab cal on yours and test other equipment w/o the cert for 1/4 the price.

[DimitriP]

Some, found this thread entertaining...and maybe in a sick sort of way it is.

But overall it is scoring pretty high on my recently calibrated bullshit meter.