Dear all,
I just want to report on my attempts to improve on a lecroy 960 wavePro 2GHz. Originally it was 1Mo max acquisition memory with 64Mo of Ram.
Opening it (following the post about a similar 950 model found on the forum) was quite easy but the bezel is very brittle (maybe plastic aging). I could not avoid breaking it in a corner dismounting it ... and breaking it again in the same bottom corner after gluing it when I mounted the scope back together. Yet this is a detail solved with tape.
Beyond cleaning a bit inside I could install the network option (totally made of unobtanium but by luck I found a card on ebay for 100€). It is not accepting auto-negotiation for RX-TX and needs a crossed cable, unless your network card on the PC is able to make the switch itself. The card is 10MBit/s and not 100. It means the theoretical peak is 1.25Mbytes/s and indeed, I could reach 1Mbytes/s on large transfer (a few MBytes at least) using VICP protocol (scope is older than LXI-VXI so you need to make creative coding) Comparatively, a USB-GPIB directly connected to the scope would give me 300kB max, on equivalently long transfers. I let you judge if a factor 3.3 justifies the work and the money. For me, it did.
I installed on the main board (easy access) a second hand 512Mo stick of SDR133 memory. Some sticks of 512 were recognized only as 128Mo while another (kingston value ram) got me up to 256Mo. I could not get anything better and I dont know if 512Mo can be recognized properly. I updated to the last bios/firmware available.
With the kind help of forum user Momchilo I could understand how option licence would work. I could increase acquisition memory to 64Mo putting option M, then L, then VL and XL. Notice that with the original stick of ram of 64Mo, acquisition memory was capped at 4Mo. It is quite certain that the ADC Memory is the same on all scopes of this series as mine was having the poorest configuration and could be improved to the max, the RAM can limit the effective memory depth, even with all options installed and you need at least 256Mo of RAM to get 64Mo acquisition memory working properly. (with 128 I had 32 working and with 64 RAM only 4Mo data). Quite possibly, the data from ADC memory goes to the main RAM before being displayed which would explain the limitations.
That is all, with those improvements this scope is totally usable for my applications. Big screen, decent transfer speed, nice bandwidth and --insane-- acquisition memory, still up with modern standards. Consider that the equivalent Lecroy DDA-260 can be found very cheap on ebay <800€. For people who need bandwidth+large memory and dont mind the 30kg and the associated fan noise, I find this 25 year old dinosaur to be still competitive.
thank you again for all your help, in particular Monchilo, and dont hesitate if you have any questions
JJ.
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