It's also worth considering the human factors of older scopes. eg fan noise and the user interface and size/power/weight. At the end of last year I saved this old HP 54540C from death row at work and I've been using it occasionally here at home.
In its day (1995?) this was a very expensive scope and offered up to 500MHz BW and 2 GSa/s and it boasted very good vertical accuracy.
But I wouldn't recommend this scope today for hobby use unless you really needed the 500MHz BW and the accuracy/measurement capabilities it offers.
The display is gloomy and loses contrast especially if viewed off centre (see below) and the fan noise is quite annoying. The fan noise would be lost in a large, busy 'open plan' lab but here at home it emits a low moaning drone from the big single fan at the back. I don't think the fan is faulty or worn out. Also, the user interface can be annoying because it shares common vertical controls for all four channels. It's also fairly big and heavy and deep so it might not fit on a typical home/hobby shelf.
However, it would make a great 'second' scope (maybe to a Rigol 1054Z?) if you just wanted to use it occasionally for critical (or high bandwidth) measurements or use it remotely via GPIB or you needed 4 channels.
But I couldn't recommend it as an only scope for everyday use. The fan noise alone is enough to spoil the user experience. Other big old school DSOs from Tek (or LeCroy?) may have similar human factor limitations. It's not all about price and performance
Actually the Tektronix TDS500/700 series are not so bad. There is a lot of information about their common problems and hacks to get some to 4Gs/s and 1GHz bandwidth. The early ones (before 1994/1995) have problems with leaky caps. Even if you end up with a bad one the ones with up to 2 errors in the startup screen are easy to fix by replacing the caps and cleaning the boards thouroughly. 3 errors or more means traces have been eaten away and you'll have a restoration project on your hands.
I'm still not sure they are worth considering, even without the capacitor issue. These scopes are still comparably expensive simply because they carry the Tektronix name, while functionality-wise most of them are pretty simple, with small memories, and they have a really horrible UI.
The capacitor issue is also not the only weak point of these scopes. The ones with color display have a pretty rearded system that instead of using a color CRT like everyone else uses a monochrome CRT with a color LCD shutter in front. Most of these shutters have detoriorated by now, finding replacements is nearly impossible, and the few conversion kits to LCD are very expensive.
Tek had really great analog scopes but none of their digital scopes are much to write home about.
Agreed. The 1054Z firmware is incredibly complicated compared to an ancient scope like an HP 54645D so it is inevitable that there will be bugs. At least Rigol do generally fix the bugs.
Agreed. The 1054Z firmware is incredibly complicated compared to an ancient scope like an HP 54645D so it is inevitable that there will be bugs. At least Rigol do generally fix the bugs.Of course it is . Because they cram in a bloated operating system, have portable middleware and slap on a fancy GUI all running on an off the shelf cheapo dsp or cpu.
Programmers these days can't code shit. all they do is take an OS, slap on some middleware and design a fancy UI. nothing is optimized for throughput.
5 million lines of code to blink an led ...
Programmers these days can't code shit. all they do is take an OS, slap on some middleware and design a fancy UI. nothing is optimized for throughput.
5 million lines of code to blink an led ...
Let's face it, oscilloscopes are no fast moving huge quantities consumer products, they are dinosaur measuring tools, managers are not willing to spent more than a few thousand $ a piece, and it has to last 5 years or longer or the engineer should use something else, at least that is the trend I am spotting depending on the line of work ofcourse.
which has brought us for example the 100GHz real-time scope.
We don't agree often
You like LeCroy, most of the people I know call them LeCrap![]()
But my guess is that 90% of the sold scopes are below 8k.
Quotewhich has brought us for example the 100GHz real-time scope.Who on this planet really needs that, I agree that it is a masterpiece of engineering and state of the art.
I guess most of our engineers don't need anything above 500MHz but that is because we don't do RF, as I said and you say it depends on the field of work.
The reason this topic exists is proof that even scopes 15 years old are still enough to be used today.
is purely from a hobbyist point of view. I doubt many businesses buy lots of 20+yr old general purpose scopes for their labs.
The noise floor of the HP 54600 Series and the LeCroy 9300 Series is actually quite good. And not all older scopes come with tiny memory. The HP 54645D I bought for example has 1M per channel which is quite useable, plus it comes with the MegaZoom ASIC which offers a very high waveform update rate.
The reason this topic exists is proof that even scopes 15 years old are still enough to be used today.Yes, but this is purely from a hobbyist point of view. I doubt many businesses buy lots of 20+yr old general purpose scopes for their labs.
When I was working for a defence contractor in circa 2002, they had old Tek 7000s for literally everything and a few mid 90's HP DSO's and logic analysers dotted around. That was for RF and digital stuff.
Surprisingly I was talking to one of the remaining employees via email last year and they still have all the 7000's they could keep alive (they have a department of people up to 80 years old who like to fix Tek scopes all day) and a few MDO4000's dotted around.
if there's one thing that's always true and that's if you give an engineer the tools he/she wants then they will get the job done better, even if they're old.
Judging from this forum there are plenty small (one person band) companies who use older equipment to get the job done. I also noticed from visiting bigger companies that old equipment tends to stay for a long time.
Yeah, I know these kind of contractors (and I do have some suspicion who this one might be), and often where government/public money is involved some silly decisions are made. Of course I don't know what they do with those old Tek 7000 scopes but unless it's something super special that for some weird reason can't be done with modern equipment then that's a good example of pissing money in the wind. The right time to look for a replacement would have been 20 years ago, and even if these retirees work for little it's still a pretty poor use of budgets. One person spending three or four hours on fixing a scope would have probably paid a large percentage of a brand new scope.
You don't understand at all... those old repair technicians are saving money.
If they switch to a more modern 'scope they'll have to update all their reference manuals and training material and send all their employees on a week-long 'adaptation' course.
All that would cost them MILLIONS. The old fogies are dirt cheap compared to any sort of upgrade.
You don't understand at all... those old repair technicians are saving money.
If they switch to a more modern 'scope they'll have to update all their reference manuals and training material and send all their employees on a week-long 'adaptation' course.
All that would cost them MILLIONS. The old fogies are dirt cheap compared to any sort of upgrade.
More seriously, the cost and time involved in recruiting any new resource into a defence environment can be surprisingly high and long.
When I was working for a defence contractor in circa 2002, they had old Tek 7000s for literally everything and a few mid 90's HP DSO's and logic analysers dotted around. That was for RF and digital stuff.
Surprisingly I was talking to one of the remaining employees via email last year and they still have all the 7000's they could keep alive (they have a department of people up to 80 years old who like to fix Tek scopes all day) and a few MDO4000's dotted around.
Yeah, I know these kind of contractors (and I do have some suspicion who this one might be), and often where government/public money is involved some silly decisions are made. Of course I don't know what they do with those old Tek 7000 scopes but unless it's something super special that for some weird reason can't be done with modern equipment then that's a good example of pissing money in the wind. The right time to look for a replacement would have been 20 years ago, and even if these retirees work for little it's still a pretty poor use of budgets. One person spending three or four hours on fixing a scope would have probably paid a large percentage of a brand new scope.
I thought the same. That was until someone showed me how to coax something out of a 1GHz Tek that refused to appear on the replacement HP digital scope. Nanosecond wide reflection. I suspect the gap in tech is a little smaller now. I haven't been near any new scopes for a while
These weren't contractors - they were permanent staff at a contractor.
As for fogies, they are terrible. The same guys wouldn't use the provided software asset tracking system and reverted to envelopes stuffed with bits of card...grr!
Not that this surprises me, having seen how the British Defense Industry works on too many occasions
Yes, in moderationThere's simply a point where the tools this type of older engineer prefers still make the job taking much longer than with a modern tool set operated by an engineer (older, younger, age doesn't really matter) who's learning and self-development hasn't stopped back in the '70s.
Judging from this forum there are plenty small (one person band) companies who use older equipment to get the job done. I also noticed from visiting bigger companies that old equipment tends to stay for a long time.