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Let’s Talk About LeCroy Scopes, AKA… the “Wuerstchenhund Holds Court” Thread

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Keysight DanielBogdanoff:

--- Quote from: Wuerstchenhund on November 09, 2015, 09:33:39 am ---

--- Quote ---This thread is intended to stimulate a discussion of LeCroy scopes...
--- End quote ---

It's aimed mostly against the Keysight DSOX3000T, which is a good scope, however there are a few points that speak for the WS3000 (taken from an earlier positing:


* The Wavesurfer comes with a larger screen with higher resolution (10.1" 1024x600 vs 8.4" 800x480 with the DSOX3kT)
* For scopes with bandwidths up to 1GHz I'd say in practical terms 4GSa/s and 10Mpts is probably much more useful than 5GSa/s and only 4Mpts memory
* FFT with the WaveSurfer is up to 1Mpts while the DSOX3kT uses only 64kpts which is pretty poor
* The WaveSurfer allows automatic and manual sample memory/sample rate management while the DSOX3kT is automatic only
* Unlike the DSOX3kT, which feature-wise is not that much better than the DSOX2k, the WaveSurfer 3000 has many features that can be found in LeCroy's high-end scopes, i.e. WaveScan and LabNotebook.
* The DSOX3kT has nothing comparable to WaveScan, which is a very versatile tool to find rare glitches and other issues and which works 'live' as well as on sampled data.
* The DSOX3kT also doesn't offer anything comparable to LabNotebook, which is a documentation tool and pretty neat if you have to document your measurements in some standardized format.
* The WaveSurfer 3000 uses the same probe interface (ProBus) all midrange and high-end scope from LeCroy use since the mid '90s, which means there's a wide range of suitable active probes out there, including a lot of second-hand ones which often sell for reasonable prices because they don't carry the "Tektronix" or "Agilent" label
* Integrated AWG: 25MHz 125MSa/s 14bit with 16kpts on the WaveSurfer, 20MHz 100MSa/s 10bit with 8kpts on the DSOX3kT (both not great, but still)
* LAN is standard on the WaveSurfer 3000 while it's a $400 option on the already expensive DSO3kT
* Not that important, but the WaveSurfer has four (2x front, 2x rear) USB host ports (Keysight two, one front one rear)
* Plus the WaveSurfer 3000 is noticably cheaper than the DSOX3kT

--- End quote ---

I don't want to derail the thread with a comparison shootout, but I feel obligated to chip in on a couple points for the Keysight scopes (bear with me)


* Keysight's capacitive touch screen vs WS3k resistive touch screen. Ask for a demo/loaner, you won't want a scope without it
* Serial decoding is done in hardware, so it's stinkin fast (also we have more supported protocols)
* Keysight FFT is hardware accelerated, can be signal gated, and has a peak search in the lister
* 3 year cal cycle vs 1 year cal cycle
* Keysight acquisition modes (normal, peak detect, average, high resolution) vs WS3k with "normal" mode only & "ERES" as a math channel
* Keysight DVM and hardware frequency counter & totalizer vs N/A
* Keysight 1 knob set per channel vs multiplexed channel knobs
* and of course waveform update rate and zone trigger...  :horse:
That's all, carry on.
  :popcorn:

nctnico:
Hmm, how could I have missed the Wavesurfer 3000 has no peak detect  ???

TAMHAN:
This is very odd now.  LeCroy already had Peak Detect in the 9354AM - see the video below:


tautech:
I too find it very odd that a WS3000 does not have Peak Detect.  :scared:
One can only imagine that it's been left out of the incorporated features on purpose, if indeed it is missing.  :-//
As a WS3000 is Siglent HW but apparently LeCroy couldn't trust Siglent to write the FW there only seems 2 explanations: Daniel's wrong or indeed LeCroy has left this basic feature out.

Both the Siglents that have evolved from about the same time as the WS3000 (Siglent SDS3000) do indeed have Peak Detect as do many of the Siglent range;

SDS2304X:

David Hess:
The oldest DSO I am aware of with peak detection is the Tektronix 2230 which was first available in 1986 and implemented it with TTL using 74ALS574s octal D flip-flops for registers and 74LS684s 8-bit magnitude comparators.

Implementation of peak detection is not trivial since it has to occur at the full digitizer sample rate.  The 2232 which replaced the 2230 just 4 years later had 5 times the sample rate at 100 MS/s and implement peak detection in a custom ASIC which interfaced the digitizer to memory.  In theory discrete logic could still have been used but complex MSI functions like the 74LS684 were never made available in faster logic processes.  I hate to imagine how much power an ECL implementation would take but I am sure someone did it.

Peak detection became free or at least very inexpensive with programmable logic which was already used to either store the acquisition record in embedded SRAM or interface the digitizer to discrete memory but even so, low cost DSOs even now often lack this feature like many Rigol DSOs before the 1000Z series.  Of course if you are Tektronix, HP/Agilent/Keysight, LeCroy, or any other major OEM, you have been implementing this inside of an ASIC for a long time.

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