Magnova oscilloscope

[LoneWolf6912]

As always Martin for the win 

[44kgk1lkf6u]

I made it myself with a label printer...

Why is the label in English instead of German?

[Martin72]

When it comes to measuring devices, I prefer everything to be in English.
It regularly annoys me at work when I take a scope out of the cabinet and someone has set the menu to German.

[Sorama]

I made it myself with a label printer...

Why is the label in English instead of German?

because this forum is in English !

 

[woody]

Arrived today and immediately prepared, looks good.
Better than in the ordinary cardboard box, for just over €20.
Now I have three of the same cases, I'll have to ask Batronix if they can give me some stickers with the company logo...

@Martin72
Nice cases indeed. I had a bit of trouble to get Amazon to send them to Holland but the second attempt succeeded. I ordered five so I finally have some solid storage space for all equipment that still sits in the cardboard boxes they came in (pH meter, uCurrent, LiteVNA, voltage reference) and that I never can find when I need them.

Thanks for the heads-up!

[KungFuJosh]

I'm up past my bedtime playing with a new toy...

Holy crap, Batman! This thing is pretty awesome. I think Batronix has been spying on all the things we complain about other scopes not having, and made sure to put them in this thing.

My first impression is that it's a nice design, mostly intuitive, with a few rough edges waiting to be smoothed out with updated firmware.

The two big things, which I believe will be resolved soon: the lack of a dedicated counter, and the web server. Once those things are mature, this is going to kill a lot of scopes on the market...at least for me anyway. I guess it already did.

The screen is awesome, no question about it. I'm very happy about the 10MHz external reference input, but it was a little awkward to find it in the acquire menu, which I guess sorta makes sense. I found it though! Haven't had to read the manual yet. 

Something that bugged me on other scopes was cursors were only able to be defined by the X axis. Magnova works on X or Y axis, and it's awesome.

Another thing I love is how you can mess with the split screen section sizes. Make whatever you want, whatever size you want, and without any effort.

The touch display in general feels responsive and quick. Generally not waiting for things to happen, which is great. Even the FFT is fast and responsive, no matter what I do to it. I can adjust the start and stop points, no lag, no issues, and doesn't start over for no reason.

I did manage to get it to crash in the first few minutes of using it. That was frustrating because, it was the first few minutes, and all the customization settings, time zone, etc. got lost and had to be redone after power cycling the scope. I made sure to set everything, save a settings backup, and power cycle the scope before screwing around again.

I'll see if I can get it to crash again, but the way I did it was FFT on CH1 setup (see photo), but I hadn't selected measurements yet. It was when I was selecting measurements that it crashed, after I got to the 5th measurement added, the scope froze and wouldn't respond at all. Next time I picked my measurements before starting FFT, and there were no issues.

The screenshots were saved directly to a Kingston 128GB flash drive, no issues with that either.

I don't love the side jacks. It's impossible to use/mount the way I wanted to, and I'm going to have to buy a rack to mount it in and make it work well on my bench. But it's worth it! I really dig the scope. Obviously.

One thing that is slightly concerning is how hot it seems to run. The right side of the scope gets pretty hot, and all the jacks and everything connected takes heat too. The metal BNC connector on the cable was hot, the metal shell of the Kingston flash drive was also hot. Thermal camera said max of about 115F, which isn't crazy, but is that normal? I assume if I change the default fan settings that should improve. Perhaps tomorrow I'll try that out.

Thanks,
Josh

[Sorama]

As metal has a low emissivity, you really need to configure the emissivity on your thermal camera in order to have correct temperature readings.

Did you?

[Martin72]

Hi,
My thermal pictures:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/magnova-oscilloscope/msg5667121/#msg5667121

Btw, congrats Josh...

[Sorama]

Hi,
My thermal pictures:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/magnova-oscilloscope/msg5667121/#msg5667121

Btw, congrats Josh...

Martin,

The used emissivity (0.95) can not be used when measuring metals or glass (way, way lower!!)

You need to determine the real emissivity of the material you want to measure and configure accordingly.


It’s like calibrating a device. If you have an offset of 3V, you cannot correctly measure a signal that looks like having 2V.

[Martin72]

Hi,
Most of the casing is painted black, so it's fine.

[Sorama]

Hi,
Most of the casing is painted black, so it's fine.

Color has no impact on emissivity or reflectivity when measuring midrange IR  (= inhouse temperatures).
Emissivity is only changing (getting higher) when radiated by higher temperatures like sun IR waves ( shorter waves).

For example: sun IR radiation gets through glass because of its short wave, but once inside can’t get out anymore because of re-radiation with long wave IR I lower temperatures.
It’s known as the greenhouse effect.

So no, you still have to determine the (very) low emissivity of the metal housing and compensate your measurement with it.
Otherwise it is way off.

In other words:
Highly reflective surfaces like polished metals ( like the Magnova) have low emissivity and are poor emitters of thermal radiation.

[KungFuJosh]

Well, since we both allegedly measured incorrectly, and my temperatures were lower than Martin's, I'll guess it's okay.

Aaaand since we all love cases so much, here are some photos. I used a Nanuk 909 for these probes, and another of the same for my SPL2016.

Thanks,
Josh

[KungFuJosh]

Btw, congrats Josh...

Thanks!

What bandwidth did yours test at? I seem to be pretty comfortable at 442MHz. Not too shabby!

[Martin72]

What bandwidth did yours test at? I seem to be pretty comfortable at 442MHz. Not too shabby!

For me, it was around 440 MHz:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/magnova-oscilloscope/msg5675673/#msg5675673

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/magnova-oscilloscope/msg5676745/#msg5676745

Here, Andre describes an alternative measurement:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/magnova-oscilloscope/msg5677473/#msg5677473

[KungFuJosh]

I'm a big fan of the display options.

It took me a minute to figure out how to set the 2us time base delay (offset). Memory depth had to be set manually, as the auto mem depth limited the offset. Which I found odd because even then, the memory depth was higher than the settings I normally have on my SDS2504X HD.

OTOH, the Magnova also managed to catch weird behavior from the SDG between waveform changes that didn't show up on the Siglent even with infinite persistence.

Thanks,
Josh

ETA: The only Display option I'm not a fan of is the lack of screen saver options.

[DaneLaw]

Hi,
My thermal pictures:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/magnova-oscilloscope/msg5667121/#msg5667121

Btw, congrats Josh...

,

The used emissivity (0.95) can not be used when measuring metals or glass (way, way lower!!)

0.95 is ideal for a matt black coating like on Magnova..
If its a glossy black finish, your emissivity is down around 0.85-0.90, but it looks like a matt annodized coating

[Martin72]

Exactly that.
Paint, matte black 0.97, a black anodized heat sink 0.98 (Flir)
At work, we stick black measuring points onto bare heat sinks, which we then use to take measurements.

[KungFuJosh]

Either way, my Magnova is cooler than your Magnova.

[Martin72]

Either that or your measurements were worse.
Joking aside, the scope does get warm, no question about it.
But it's still well within the safe range as long as you can touch it continuously; as long as that's the case, it's below 50°C.
So depending on how thick your cornea is...

[rf-messkopf]

My BMO350 also arrived today with the parcel service, ordered Friday late afternoon, and shipped on Monday. It's serial No. 1220, which may be a hint of how many they have sold so far.

See BMO350_bandwidth_ch1.png for a quick bandwidth test. I get about 430 MHz (-3 dB) with the amplitude correction filter enabled. Looking at that picture again, the unit of the "FFT1 Scale" knob should be "dB/div" and not "dBm/div", but that's nitpicking. 

BMO350_spurs.png shows the generated harmonics and spurs for a 100 kHz signal. Basically, it satisfies its datasheet specs, but still not a replacement for a proper spectrum analyzer, but an improvement over an 8-bit scope (RTM2054_spurs.png shows a FFT of the same signal on a R&S RTM2054 for comparison). See input_signal.png for the spectrum of the input signal on a swept frequency spectrum analyzer.

I also checked the return loss of the BMO350 inputs when switched to 50 ohms (BMO350_retloss_ch1.png). The result fully meets expectations for an oscilloscope input.

I have not yet played with the decoders and the logic probe, but other than that it is a very nice scope. There is room for improvement here and there but overall I'm quite happy so far.

According to the invoice the AWG will be available mid to end of August. I'm curious to see how it performs.

[KungFuJosh]

I don't expect a scope to be a good spectrum analyzer, or vice versa. If it did, then I wouldn't have an excuse to get a separate SA!

[KungFuJosh]

I left the scope running for a while with the fan active. Peak temperature was 107.4F; better than the 119F peak without the fan running. The fan isn't that loud at all, I'll probably leave it on all the time. The stuff connected on the right was slightly warm at most, certainly cooler than before.

Accurate or not, I dunno, but in either case the thermal camera thought the screen was 96F.

[rf-messkopf]

I'm playing around with the triggers a bit and came across the following:

Pulse Trigger (trigger on pulse width):
Set up pulses with 100 µs length, and frequency 1 kHz (say). Select "pulse" trigger with timing "greater than 90 µs". The scope triggers on the pulses as expected (see screenshot) since thy are longer then 90 µs. If you change the 90 µs to a value greater than 100 µs the scope stops triggering, also as expected. Now change timing to "less than 150 µs". The scope does not trigger, even though the pulses at the input are shorter than 150 µs. In fact, I cannot get the scope to trigger with "less than", regardless of the selected parameters. Also, when set to, e.g., "inside 10 µs to 150 µs" I cannot get the scope to trigger. When set to "outside 10 µs to 20 µs", the scope triggers as expected, but not when set to "outside 200µs to 300 µs".



Timeout Trigger (dropout):
Set up a 1 kHz square wave with every 9th and 10th positive going pulse missing (i.e., with a 2 ms gap). Select "timeout" trigger with "timeout 1 ms". The scope is not triggering, in spite of the dropout. Only when I set "slope" to "both" it will trigger. See the screenshot. Why do I have to set "slope" to both? Is that the intended behavior?



Are these bugs, or am I missing something? At least this is not the behavior I know from the R&S scopes.

[Martin72]

Hi,

I won't have time to confirm or refute your findings until next weekend, unless another owner does so before then.

[KungFuJosh]

Hmm, I think their MSO demo board could be useful for testing those.