Keysight MXR 8 channel scope

[CRTbrain]

https://www.keysight.com/en/pcx-3062392/infiniium-mxr-series-real-time-oscilloscopes?nid=-31731.0.00&cc=US&lc=eng

I saw that Keysight has introduced their MXR 8 channels scopes.  Amazing to see pricing of $108,000 for a 6 GHz scope.  I guess it helps that they are becoming more and more dominant in the scope market and have greater control on price.  Anyone had a demo?

[Mr. Scram]

Are these the new oscilloscopes hinted at elsewhere on the forums? They appear to be only a smidge over my budget.

[ralphrmartin]

You might be able to haggle over that last $8k 

[jjoonathan]

RTSA features? CALLED IT!!! 

16GS/s? CALLED IT!!! 

Infiniium Model T -- comes in any color you want as long as that's black? Half right 

13GHz? Swing and a miss -- but it's hard to interleave so well that you don't get spurs, so I don't blame them too much.


Now the long wait to get my hands on one begins! I first saw the RTO1024 in 2011 and didn't find one broken/fixable/cheap on ebay until 2019, but it did eventually happen. Dibs on the first broken/cheap/fixable MXR to hit ebay a decade from now!

[Keysight DanielBogdanoff]

Well that page wasn't supposed to be indexed for search yet 

Great scope, though! Got to play with one a couple weeks ago and it is really nice 

[trophosphere]

I guess I'll have to hold off on a new oscilloscope purchase and save up more then. The software licenses are likely to double the price though. 

[Eric_S]

https://www.keysight.com/en/pcx-3062392/infiniium-mxr-series-real-time-oscilloscopes?nid=-31731.0.00&cc=US&lc=eng

I saw that Keysight has introduced their MXR 8 channels scopes.  Amazing to see pricing of $108,000 for a 6 GHz scope.  I guess it helps that they are becoming more and more dominant in the scope market and have greater control on price.  Anyone had a demo?

Called it. (Low content post? Low content post.)

[balage]

I have heard a rumor, that the US list price of the base, bare MXR054 unit is around 20 000 USD.

[maginnovision]

Well it says on the page it is 19k for the 500MHz 4 Channel model so I'm not sure I'd call it a rumor.

[balage]

On what page have you seen the prices? Are there the prices there for the options/upgrades?

[srce]

On what page have you seen the prices? Are there the prices there for the options/upgrades?

If you want to see prices on keysight's web page, make sure you have your country set to be US.

[srce]

Less noise, better display resolution and much higher waveform update rate compared to the S-series, which are 3 improvements I would like. Not sure if it would be worth the upgrade though.

[porker1972]

Noise is better, though I'm not sure is 2x lower. ENOB is the real measure, that claims to better than S-Series on every bandwidth and better than 12-bit scopes which lose any digitization resolution advantage in their front-end noise.

Screen is HD 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, S-Series is XGA (1,024 x 768). Does anyone offer 4K?!

Update rate at 200,000 waveforms per second is almost as fast as InfiniiVision, however a few other scopes claim that but in reality it's only in a special mode, so I'll wait and see what it really means. I think the S-Series managed about 1,000, which is typical for a high-end analysis scope which is more about deep memory than update rate. RTSA mode, with 400,000 FFTs per second is insane though - that makes it an 8-channel gapless spectrum analyser.

[nfmax]

RTSA mode, with 400,000 FFTs per second is insane though - that makes it an 8-channel gapless spectrum analyser.

That's bloody fast - might start to run into export license issues!

[nfmax]

Well that page wasn't supposed to be indexed for search yet 

Great scope, though! Got to play with one a couple weeks ago and it is really nice 

I assume this will replace the S series? I had a play with one of those a few years ago and was very impressed, but the MXR looks as if it blows the S series out of the water!

P.S. Get well soon!

[Eric_S]

Well that page wasn't supposed to be indexed for search yet 

Great scope, though! Got to play with one a couple weeks ago and it is really nice 

When can we expect to see reviewers to get their hands on this? (Like EEVBlog / The Signal Path)

[filssavi]

Finally something competitive also in the mid end as well, let’s hope for optically isolated probes

[CRTbrain]

I heard a rumor that Keysight is introducing isolated probes, but at a much lower cost than the Tek ones. 

[CRTbrain]

I'm not sure if MXR noise is better or the same as the S.  It appears to be similar.  In the datasheet it says noise values for 2 GHz and below are taken with high-res mode.  This would be done to get a lower value.  Noise values aren't shown for "normal" mode which is disappointing.  I don't typically use high-res, as it's only useful for repetitive signals when in run mode.

I know all the scope vendors try to position as having lower noise and it can be tough to determine what is real. 
ENOB values can also be challenging to interpret correctly, as it's related to a specific BW, a specific vertical setting, and doesn't include phase issues, nor offset attributes.

Keysight appears to be out inventing all competitors for high-end scopes.

[jjoonathan]

Update rate at 200,000 waveforms per second is almost as fast as InfiniiVision, however a few other scopes claim that but in reality it's only in a special mode, so I'll wait and see what it really means. I think the S-Series managed about 1,000, which is typical for a high-end analysis scope which is more about deep memory than update rate. RTSA mode, with 400,000 FFTs per second is insane though - that makes it an 8-channel gapless spectrum analyser.

R&S has had fast updates in their analysis tier (RTE/RTO/RTP) since ~2010, and there it means: with short 1k acquisitions and all channels, it'll do 1,000,000 Wfm/s in dots mode, 600k Wfm/s in lines, and for longer acquisitions all the way into gigapoints use the rule (1.5 Billion / acq_points) to get Wfm/s. It's extremely nice to have both "modes" of operation in a single instrument, because even when I've got an application that does need the memory, I wind up doing a lot of "low-analysis" probing that benefits from Wfm/s. It's great to see Keysight join this fight in the analysis-class tier after crushing it with InfiniiVision!

It's even better to see Keysight leapfrog the R&S oscilloscope spectrum analysis. The big caveat in R&S scope land is that it only acts like a real time spectrum analyzer -- taking overlapped FFTs, compositing them for display, and running them past zone triggers -- inside acquisitions. That's a big limitation. It's still a heck of a lot faster than swept analyzers, frequency domain zone triggers -> time correlation is still a brilliant workflow, but POI isn't maximized like in a true RTSA. Caveat: I only *know* this to be the case on the slightly older instruments, but I've asked, both in person and online [1], and I'm pretty sure it's still the case on their latest.

One question on the MXR: the brochure mentions Digital Down Conversion -- If I want to capture 1MHz of spectrum at 2.4 GHz and time correlate it to, say, a SPI bus, am I forced to sample the SPI bus at 5GS/s, burning through memory and Wfm/s? Or am I allowed to sample the DDC signal and SPI bus at a few MS/s?

EDIT: Is there a way to link to youtube without embedding a preview?

EDIT2: Is there a way to link to youtube without embedding a preview and without using a sketchy URL shortener?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpTK7Mpqbi0

[mike1305]

Infiniium MXR-Series product manager here. I can't hang out to answer all the questions (there are some good ones), as you can imagine I'm pretty busy with my day job right now. Guess it was serendipitous that I can't take a vacation anywhere even if I wanted to, ha ha. Anyway, maybe I'll sync up with Daniel to do some kind of Q&A session when everything calms down.

I will say that I saw this meme in another thread and definitely laughed out loud - I used to work with the InfiniiVision team for 6-7 years and I can tell you UPDATE RATE RULES haha.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/keysight-to-launch-new-oscilloscope/msg3017444/#msg3017444

FWIW, it's ~200k without any special modes or tradeoffs. I can get it up to ~300k when I turn off interpolation and nuke the sample rate/memory, but autoscale a signal and you're rocking and rolling at ~200k.

Big PR splash coming soon (look for my goofy face in Daniel's basement in a video or two, don't worry we kept our distance), but we've already been showing it to our big customers worldwide, so figured there was no real benefit of waiting any longer for the web and datasheet.

[mike1305]

One question on the MXR: the brochure mentions Digital Down Conversion -- If I want to capture 1MHz of spectrum at 2.4 GHz and time correlate it to, say, a SPI bus, am I forced to sample the SPI bus at 5GS/s, burning through memory and Wfm/s? Or am I allowed to sample the DDC signal and SPI bus at a few MS/s?

Min DDC span is 40 MHz, and you can only view a signal as time domain or DDC (or RTSA, which uses DDC). so there is no time correlation. You'd have to use FFT like before. Then it just becomes a question of what RBW you want to figure out the sample rate you'd chew up. We expect the DDC/RTSA option to be popular with more hardcore RF folks who want to stream 8 phase coherent channels of stuff to something like VSA.

I'll stop now before the PR team yells at me Expect plenty more after the press event.

[mike1305]

I'm not sure if MXR noise is better or the same as the S.  It appears to be similar.  In the datasheet it says noise values for 2 GHz and below are taken with high-res mode.  This would be done to get a lower value.  Noise values aren't shown for "normal" mode which is disappointing.  I don't typically use high-res, as it's only useful for repetitive signals when in run mode.

I know all the scope vendors try to position as having lower noise and it can be tough to determine what is real. 
ENOB values can also be challenging to interpret correctly, as it's related to a specific BW, a specific vertical setting, and doesn't include phase issues, nor offset attributes.

Keysight appears to be out inventing all competitors for high-end scopes.

FWIW, our high-res (and most others) aren't averaging. they are real time high-resolution. you can use it on a non-repetitive or even single shot waveform as long as you can deal with the BW/SR reduction. this applies to all scopes. Ours in a bit "smarter" (details later) but essentially the thought is, if you have a 1 GHz scope and are making 1 GHz measurements, Nyquist tells us 16 GSa/s is overkill anyway, so why not use that extra sampling power to boxcar average in real time and get lower noise and more resolution? can't hurt, might help.

And thanks for the compliment This ASIC we lifted from the UXR-Series is freaking nuts....

[thm_w]

EDIT: Is there a way to link to youtube without embedding a preview?

EDIT2: Is there a way to link to youtube without embedding a preview and without using a sketchy URL shortener?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpTK7Mpqbi0

Remove the http.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpTK7Mpqbi0

[porker1972]

Update rate at 200,000 waveforms per second is almost as fast as InfiniiVision, however a few other scopes claim that but in reality it's only in a special mode, so I'll wait and see what it really means. I think the S-Series managed about 1,000, which is typical for a high-end analysis scope which is more about deep memory than update rate. RTSA mode, with 400,000 FFTs per second is insane though - that makes it an 8-channel gapless spectrum analyser.

R&S has had fast updates in their analysis tier (RTE/RTO/RTP) since ~2010, and there it means: with short 1k acquisitions and all channels, it'll do 1,000,000 Wfm/s in dots mode, 600k Wfm/s in lines, and for longer acquisitions all the way into gigapoints use the rule (1.5 Billion / acq_points) to get Wfm/s. It's extremely nice to have both "modes" of operation in a single instrument, because even when I've got an application that does need the memory, I wind up doing a lot of "low-analysis" probing that benefits from Wfm/s. It's great to see Keysight join this fight in the analysis-class tier after crushing it with InfiniiVision!

I defy anyone to get the R&S scope to achieve the claimed million waveforms per second. We had one on evaluation about 5 years ago: we went through everything and couldn't get the "waveform update rate indicator" above 50k. I even rang them, the sales guy and tech support didn't know. I'm sure it's even worse than the Tektronix "fast acquisition mode" in that's only possible in some obscure settings and by saluting pixies on the way to the office that morning. As for the R&S scope UI and button layout - it was totally un-intuitive, we struggled to use it so didn't buy, no matter how high they offered to discount.