New Rigol DS1054Z oscilloscope

[Datman]

A trigger input can be useful sometime, but you can use any of the 4 inputs as a trigger and very rarely (never?) you will need displaying 4 signals triggering by another signal: no one of the 4 signals can be used as a trigger?...
A trigger input is useful if the scope has only 1 or 2 inputs: the trigger input is a cheap, "light" channel, with only a few settings, only for triggering. A 2-channel scope with external trigger input is like a "2 1/2-channel" scope.

[Fungus]

Is it possible do external trigger with this 4 ch rigol?

Yes. Any of the 4 connectors on the front can be used for triggering.

(and they often are...)

[ftonello]

Doh!!!     I can´t beleive i made this question without read the manual of my DSO oscilloscope (TEK TBS 1072B-EDU) that shows the trigger can be sourced by CH1,CH2, EXT, EXT/5 AC LINE.
Now i remebering about this from oscilloscopes classes at engeneering school. (19yr´sa ago).

Same thing with the RiGOL DS1054Z manual on section 5-2:pag 76

Trigger Source
Press MENU  Source in the trigger control area (TRIGGER) at the front panel to
select the desired trigger source. Analog channels CH1-CH4, digital channels D0-D15
or the AC Line can all be used as trigger source.
Analog channel input:
Signals input from analog channels CH1-CH4 can all be used as trigger source. No
matter whether the channel selected is enabled, the channel can work normally.
Note: When any channel among D7-D0 is enabled, CH4 cannot be used as trigger
source; when any channel among D15-D8 is enabled, CH3 cannot be used as trigger
source.
Digital channel input:
Only the digital channels turned on can be used as trigger source. Please refer to the
introduction of "To Turn on/off the Digital Channel" to turn on the desired
digital channel.
AC line:
The trigger signal is obtained from the AC power input of the oscilloscope. AC trigger
is usually used to measure signals relevant to the AC power frequency. For example,
stably trigger the waveform output from the transformer of a transformer substation;
it is mainly used in related measurements of the power industry

Just to make shure if i understood this..., if i just need from channel 1-3 to show signal, i still have the channel 4 as a tigger source (in this case, turned into a external trigger)?

As i´m returning to electronics world, planning to buy a RIGOL, need study more, instead of make silly questions again.

Anyway, Thanks for the answers and for your time...


Att

[Fungus]

Just to make shure if i understood this..., if i just need from channel 1-3 to show signal, i still have the channel 4 as a tigger source (in this case, turned into a external trigger)?

Yes. Any channel can be used as trigger.

As i´m returning to electronics world, planning to buy a RIGOL, need study more, instead of make silly questions again.

The only "silly" question is the one that isn't asked.

[ftonello]

   nice fungus....thanks again..

[Quiggers]

Just ordered one, I've been sitting on the fence for months.
Should be here by Wednesday the 2nd. All the way from Germany.
Shipping was free. Hurrah!

[Jano]

What's the latest firmware revision?

[Marcos]

00.04.03.02.03

Better stay away from this update based on others reports about it.

[borjam]

A terrific feature, now that these oscilloscopes include an Ethernet interface, would be NTP synchronization, so that captures would be accurately timestamped.

That's so much better than a RTC, having the correct time within several milliseconds.

[Karel]

A terrific feature, now that these oscilloscopes include an Ethernet interface, would be NTP synchronization, so that captures would be accurately timestamped.

That's so much better than a RTC, having the correct time within several milliseconds.

I would never connect a commercial test/measuring instrument to the internet, not even via a firewall.
Test/measuring instruments are not designed with security in mind.

[ankerwolf]

A terrific feature, now that these oscilloscopes include an Ethernet interface, would be NTP synchronization, so that captures would be accurately timestamped.
That's so much better than a RTC, having the correct time within several milliseconds.

No problem. No need of RTC or NTP.
My program saves the captured screen automatically immediately with date & time on harddisk.

[borjam]

A terrific feature, now that these oscilloscopes include an Ethernet interface, would be NTP synchronization, so that captures would be accurately timestamped.

That's so much better than a RTC, having the correct time within several milliseconds.

I would never connect a commercial test/measuring instrument to the internet, not even via a firewall.
Test/measuring instruments are not designed with security in mind.

I know, but you can do it safely if you are behind a NAT router. Unless the oscilloscope tries to "call home" or something (my Rigol certainly does not, I have tried and my Netflow didn't see anything but BOOTP/DHCP requests) there is no risk at all.

But in certain troubleshooting tasks, a ms-level synchronized clock can really help correlate events.

For example: I am trying to debug a hardware problem in a storage server. Wondering about power rail problems, I am planning to monitor the internal power rails (+5, -5, +12, -12) while I run some tests. The fault can take from 20 minutes to 2 hours to appear, and the tell-tale sign is a message in the system log.

If I could correlate a system log message with an oscilloscope trigger event with such kind of accuracy it would be a real help in a situation like this.

[bitseeker]

I would never connect a commercial test/measuring instrument to the internet, not even via a firewall.
Test/measuring instruments are not designed with security in mind.

Agreed.

I know, but you can do it safely if you are behind a NAT router.

To each his own. Routers get hacked too, especially consumer-grade ones with shoddy manufacturer firmware.

[Howardlong]

I would never connect a commercial test/measuring instrument to the internet, not even via a firewall.
Test/measuring instruments are not designed with security in mind.

Agreed.

I know, but you can do it safely if you are behind a NAT router.

To each his own. Routers get hacked too, especially consumer-grade ones with shoddy manufacturer firmware.

Maybe, but realistically I'd strongly suggest that a technical risk assessment would show few prepubescent script monkeys are interested in targeting a Rigol scope, I'd suggest if they've got that far there are far bigger and easier fish to fry.

[miguelvp]

NTP usually just syncs the time and then uses an RTC to keep the time so it's not going to be that accurate anyhow, plus do you want to burden the already overworked processors and slow the scope down slightly more? I don't see a big gain on this since it can't be precise enough to sync say two pieces of test equipment to the point that the data will align perfectly.

Maybe you'll be able to sync them to +- 10ms, what will that give you?

Take into account that the time kept after sync depends on the scopes internal timing and two crystals will alias from each other because they are just not going to be at the same exact frequency and there is little you can do to compensate for that. And syncing for better than 1ms, forget about it without additional hardware and/or software if for example you could use the CPU instruction counter but that will drift with temperature or uptime.

Of course some kind of industry standard would be needed, still if you want to sync two or more pieces of test equipment and you are measuring signals at the micro or nano second scale, then you are going to be out of luck without putting a lot of money for the feature, which goes beyond what a budget scope like the one we are referring to is.

[borjam]

NTP usually just syncs the time and then uses an RTC to keep the time so it's not going to be that accurate anyhow, plus do you want to burden the already overworked processors and slow the scope down slightly more? I don't see a big gain on this since it can't be precise enough to sync say two pieces of test equipment to the point that the data will align perfectly.

A proper implementation of NTP in a proper operating system (read, not Windoze, where NTP seems to be like rocket science, according to the nightmares experienced by ham operators running JT modes) not just reads time, sets it, but it can slow down or accelerate the system clock so that it's really well adjusted.

NTP works very well on any Unix system such as FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Linux...

Maybe you'll be able to sync them to +- 10ms, what will that give you?

The ablity to determine which of a flood of debugging messages can correlate to, for example, an anomaly detected on a power line.

Take into account that the time kept after sync depends on the scopes internal timing and two crystals will alias from each other because they are just not going to be at the same exact frequency and there is little you can do to compensate for that. And syncing for better than 1ms, forget about it without additional hardware and/or software if for example you could use the CPU instruction counter but that will drift with temperature or uptime.

If properly done it's not "time after sync"

[miguelvp]

I stand by NTP not being too useful for a DS1054Z, as for being done properly and not needing "time after sync" do you care to elaborate?

Maybe you should read this:
http://www.ntp.org/ntpfaq/NTP-s-algo.htm

I could see some benefit for nanosecond synchronization but the hardware needed would be cost prohibited for entry level scopes.
Within a second might be useful for some, maybe add MIDI to them so it can be all synced at the macro scale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI

Nope I'm not really kidding, that protocol was developed pretty much for this purpose, it doesn't have to be all music

Edit: but then again, there is GPIB (IEEE-488) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE-488
but I don't know anything about that protocol since I never had to use it, but surely it can handle syncing various TE since it was done for that purpose.

Edit2: but thinking a bit more about it, for automated testing you have  SCPI (used on GPIB) already implemented via Ethernet (via LXI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAN_eXtensions_for_Instrumentation) on the Rigol and other TE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Commands_for_Programmable_Instrumentation
So you can use that for:

The ablity to determine which of a flood of debugging messages can correlate to, for example, an anomaly detected on a power line.

[borjam]

I stand by NTP not being too useful for a DS1054Z, as for being done properly and not needing "time after sync" do you care to elaborate?

Maybe you should read this:
http://www.ntp.org/ntpfaq/NTP-s-algo.htm

I could see some benefit for nanosecond synchronization but the hardware needed would be cost prohibited for entry level scopes.

In operating systems that support it, generally Unix systems, NTP can adjust the clock frequency to minimize error. So it's not just a program reading the time from a server and setting it afterwards, as ntpdate does.

This is the system call: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ntp_adjtime&sektion=2

The advantage of ntp in this case is, it's not complicated, these oscilloscopes already have an Ethernet interface, a TCP/IP stack and, quite for sure, a Linux or FreeBSD system, and NTP can be useful in places not exactly instrumentation-savvy like IT departments. Some people in those departments can't realize how useful an oscilloscope can be when diagnosing paranormal phenomena.

Anyway, just an idea that could help Rigol enter a market entirely new for them

[luma]

NTP isn't rocket science and it's widely implemented (and works just fine under Windows, not sure where that came from).  It's the bog-standard interface for network time delivery.  If there was going to be some sort of time synchronization it seems silly to use anything else.

[borjam]

NTP isn't rocket science and it's widely implemented (and works just fine under Windows, not sure where that came from).  It's the bog-standard interface for network time delivery.  If there was going to be some sort of time synchronization it seems silly to use anything else.

Microsoft claims that their implementation does not support synchronization to a precision of one or two seconds, what they call high accuracy environments.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/939322

This certainly reflects what I've seen in the WSJT mailing lists, where people seem to be solving puzzles in order to keep an accurate time on Windows. Otherwise, why would anyone recommend a third party time synchronization program?

[gmb42]

NTP isn't rocket science and it's widely implemented (and works just fine under Windows, not sure where that came from).  It's the bog-standard interface for network time delivery.  If there was going to be some sort of time synchronization it seems silly to use anything else.

Microsoft claims that their implementation does not support synchronization to a precision of one or two seconds, what they call high accuracy environments.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/939322

This certainly reflects what I've seen in the WSJT mailing lists, where people seem to be solving puzzles in order to keep an accurate time on Windows. Otherwise, why would anyone recommend a third party time synchronization program?

It's not really a claim, more a statement of fact by the software provider, anyway for this OT diversion, the NTP application itself, as suggested by others, does work on Windows.  Whether it has sufficient accuracy  for some folks tasks is for discussion elsewhere.

As to whether I think a scope, whether a low end or high end needs NTP, the answer for me is no.  That's a very specific user requirement that's probably better handled in some other form.

[borjam]

It's not really a claim, more a statement of fact by the software provider,

I stand corrected (English is a second language for me)

[ftonello]

Arrived today from Tequipament!





Any good (and working) site to generate the keys to unlock all features?

Calibration date sheet (certificate of calibration): 25-dec-2015 ....(working at xmas???)

Att

[McBryce]

Calibration date sheet (certificate of calibration): 25-dec-2015 ....(working at xmas???)

Att

Christmas isn't a holiday in China.

McBryce.

[ftonello]

Calibration date sheet (certificate of calibration): 25-dec-2015 ....(working at xmas???)

Att

Christmas isn't a holiday in China.

McBryce.

I know kkkk. ..but it is strage ins´t? i was with my family eating the xmas dinner...and someone in the other side of the world was at his job calibrating a oscilloscope... a world with many cultures...nice!