Author Topic: Nice, older DSO advice  (Read 18921 times)

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Offline joeqsmith

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #75 on: May 30, 2019, 01:27:58 am »
From $5000 100MHz scopes for FPGA work to this.   

And as Wuerstchenhund was, you are abrasive, rude and disrespectful. He wasn't banned because of his knowledge that was wast.
The man is a walking encyclopedia of scopes. Shame he's gone, really.
He was banned because he was getting in constant fights with members, and because he was asshole about it.

I always figured he was in sales.   He was on me about how installing SSDs into my DSOs would never work.   Then it was about how adding a 1Gb Ethernet card would cause problems.   After several years of flawless work, I have to say his advice was flawed.   He was going on about not using a PC to post process data, which of course I continue to do..   Of course he would fight these sort of points to the bitter end.   I just don't think his ego could handle it and it would make him get aggressive.   Personally, I didn't mind and enjoyed poking him with a stick every now and then.  I'm sure he felt the same about me.  :-DD     I would rather have people like him around as he brought a lot to the table.   

Offline james_s

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #76 on: May 30, 2019, 02:12:15 am »
I don't think any of the big brand scopes "stink", but rather some have an interface clearly descended from earlier analog scopes while others take more liberty starting with the standpoint of a completely new type of instrument. It largely comes down to preference and your style of working. I like the classic Tek UI personally and dislike scopes that are an embedded PC running Windows but there are lots of good scopes out there, some with less of a brand premium on the price than others. I find for example that the older low end Tek DSOs seem to have hugely inflated prices, they're not bad instruments but they offer nothing to justify the high price. Higher up the scale there is less discrepancy.

If you are contemplating dropping $5k on a scope I would assume you have a pretty good idea of what you need it to do.

 

Offline Neomys Sapiens

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #77 on: May 30, 2019, 02:22:43 am »
I was working on solid state power controllers (remote controlled switch + overcurrent protection) at the time. I used a setup with a fast thyristor and a pulse generator as a delay to place a 'short' all over the waveform under various conditions (resistive, inductive, capacitive loads, in the current or voltage maximum, etc.) Then someone 'stole' the Tek scope that I was using and I had to make do with the available LeCroy. With this scope, trigger point setting was coupled to vertical scale factor, so I could not change V/div without having to reset my carefully found trigger. This drove me crazy, as I consider it a total mistake.
 

Offline Mechatrommer

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #78 on: May 30, 2019, 05:17:25 am »
And as Wuerstchenhund was, you are abrasive, rude and disrespectful. He wasn't banned because of his knowledge that was wast.
The man is a walking encyclopedia of scopes. Shame he's gone, really.
He was banned because he was getting in constant fights with members, and because he was asshole about it.
I always figured he was in sales.   He was on me about how installing SSDs into my DSOs would never work.   Then it was about how adding a 1Gb Ethernet card would cause problems.   After several years of flawless work, I have to say his advice was flawed.
i thought you were on sales too selling brand name fuse. after several years of happy living with some strand of wire as fuse, I have to say your advice was flawed ;) but that just a joke, an idiom that i dont know how to say in english.... returning what a person says about other back to him... you maybe think the world is only blue, and for him the world is only yellow. but assumption with lack of investigation is not a good assumption imho, check his posts on Lecroy's DSO upgrade he was happy about... https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/upgrading-mainboard-in-lecroy-dda-3000-(aka-wavepro-7300a)/msg967649/#msg967649

so my "assumption" was that he lacks of knowledge on how to upgrade a DSO, so he thought its impossible, but sadly its only for him, that he cannot see, he thought there is only one color, until he saw the other color. after looking at most of his post, i dont think he is an oscilloscope angel nor guru nor a walking encyclopedia, he is maybe just an overly enthusiastic and experienced Lecroy DSO user, he maybe have more knowledge and details on that, but if we ask him about Tektronix or Agilent DSO, then he can be as clueless as others. otoh i tried to find which Wuerstchenhund's post that was really insulting but i cant find one, so i guess some fools who think the world is only blue made a report on him.

Personally, I didn't mind and enjoyed poking him with a stick every now and then.  I'm sure he felt the same about me.  :-DD
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Online tautech

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #79 on: May 30, 2019, 05:47:04 am »
otoh i tried to find which Wuerstchenhund's post that was really insulting but i cant find one, so i guess some fools who think the world is only blue made a report on him.
This ^
I too looked for some good reason Dave banned him as W had toned his posts down some after a short term ban as a warning.
There weren't any !  :-//

Dave maintained the ongoing reports to mods against W tipped the balance for him to issue the ban.
W and I share the odd email about stuff and he's moderately active on the allaboutcircuits forum.

Now EEVblog is larger and hosts a more informed membership Wuerstchenhund's presence here could be tolerated and keep things way interesting, possibly even drawing more members to come aboard.
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Offline DaJMasta

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #80 on: May 30, 2019, 05:54:09 am »
This thread has taken yet another unexpected detour, but it's entirely possible that said posts are deleted, or there were instances of that behavior in private messages.  From moderating forums like this, there are a lot of ways to remove problematic things and there are a lot of ways to keep tabs on members frequently stirring up trouble that are invisible to normal users.

No particular experience in the aforementioned case here, but I doubt anyone not receiving the reports or seeing deleted posts has enough of the full picture to really make the call either way, and I don't expect that us regular forumgoers will ever be privy to all the relevant details.... it's an unrealistic expectation.
 

Offline Mr Nutts

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #81 on: May 30, 2019, 09:49:13 am »
I just came back and saw this thread has got some new replies, many about Mr Wurstunhund. As someone who has read all he has ever written in that forum, some of the claims that were now made appeared bogus to me :)
 
Like this one:
 
Quote from: joeqsmith
He was on me about how installing SSDs into my DSOs would never work.

I was not able to find any message where he said that installing SSDs in your DSOs would never work. In fact, he often recommended to replace hard drives with SSDs :-//
 
However, I did find this in your thread about your Lecroy scope which I guess is what you meant:
 
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/teledyne-lecroy-waverunner-64xi/
 
Quote from: joeqsmith
Just be careful with SSDs in that scope, as they tend to suffer from file system corruption (I tried several ones, including the Transcend PATA SSD on your picture), and all suffered from the same problem.
 
The reason seems to be that the SSDs only really support UDMA modes, which for PATA requires a 80 conductor cable to work reliably. The scope however uses a 44pin cable (there are no 84 conductor cables, at least I'm not aware of them) which is not really suited for UDMA66 or faster modes. Another forum user (Tunersandwich) who has the same scope made the same experience, he also tried a SSHD but that was a no-go either.
 
In the end I went back to spinning rust, i.e. a modern fast SATA laptop drive connected through a cheap SATA-PATA bridge. Works fine and absolutely reliable.

Later in the same thread he replied to you with this:
 
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/teledyne-lecroy-waverunner-64xi/msg679459/#msg679459
 
Quote
What model of Transcend SSD did you use? It seems Transcend has replaced the PSD320 (which was one of the drives that was suffering from corruption in the WRXi) with the PSD330, and according to the Transcend representative I talked to the PSD330 has improved firmware which handles PIO and UDMA33 modes much better.
 
Also, the WRXi wasn't the only case where the older 320s ran into problems.
 
I also wouldn't worry about SSD lifetime. Just leave some space unpartitioned (overprovisioning), and disable auto defrag in XP, and the SSD should work fine for many years to come.

He pretty much just said that he had problems in his own attempt to convert a specific scope to SSD, and explained what the culprit was. It turned out that when you did your conversion you used a SSD that wasn't affected by the problem.
 
That reads a lot different than "He was on me about how installing SSDs into my DSOs would never work". Care to explain? :-//
 
 
Then there's that:
 
Quote
Then it was about how adding a 1Gb Ethernet card would cause problems.

I believe this is the thread you are talking about:
 
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/show-us-your-square-wave/msg597515/#msg597515
 
Quote
Quote
> I may install 1Gb Ethernet and see if I can pull the data out any faster.
 
I doubt that. The scope's mobo has a single 33MHz PCI32 bus which is also used by the aquisition adapter (which converts the 4x Gbit Ethernet links from the acquisition board to PCI). Aside from that the max 133MB/s (theoretical, in reality it's probably closer to around 90MB/s) overall bus bandwidth which is shared across all devices and from which the acquisition system already uses a bulk of, the timing in these scopes is pretty tight so introducing another card might have some side effects.

This also reads a lot different. He doesn't say it will cause problems, he says it won't be very fast and may well have side effects.
 
Later in the thread he replied to you with this:
 
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/show-us-your-square-wave/msg597693/#msg597693
 
Quote
Just because you were lucky doesn't mean that such mods are always troublefree. In fact, it might well be that your mod has other side effects you just didn't notice (yet). Just because something looks ok doesn't necessarily mean it is. Also, do you know how many different PCI 1Gbps network adapters exist? And just because you didn't see side effects with one makes you think it will always be allright? Hopefully not.
 
The simple fact is that these scopes are not designed as expandable systems, and just because you can plug in some PCI card doesn't mean it can be expanded like a standard PC. The scope as sold is the only supported (i.e. guranteed to work) configuration, aside from a few upgrades offered by LeCroy like CPU and RAM (which even if done with generic parts should be pretty painless). And really, it should be pretty obvious to an EE why on a single PCI bus with a theoretical max transfer rate of 133MB/s a 1Gbps network adapter (which in a good environment transfers between 90-100MB/s) doesn't leave much room for anything else. And something like 33MB/s isn't much for an acquisition system which captures over 20GB data per second, and while not everything in the sample memory goes to the CPU, everything that you want to see on the screen or that you want to process in any way does. Well, you do the math.
 
In addition, the acquisition system in these LeCroy scopes definitely *is* timing sensitive. I've been bitten by this myself when I upgraded my CPU (hint: never enable Hyperthreading on a WP7k(A) or WM8k(A), unless you want to reinstall your OS).
 
This aside, "just works" isn't really good enough if you want to use your test kit professionally, where people generally want to have something that is supported by the manufacturer and where problems are solved by their support. If you modded your scope most manufacturers simply tell you to piss off, and rightfully so.

So his point was really that the faster adapter is unlikely to give you a notable speed boost but comes with the risk of side effects. That reads a lot different from "Then it was about how adding a 1Gb Ethernet card would cause problems." :-//
 
So would you mind to clarify your statements? Because that reads a lot like you're twisting facts :--
 
Quote from: joeqsmith
He was going on about not using a PC to post process data

Can you please point to that message because I could not find it :-//
 
 
Quote from: Mechatrommer
you maybe think the world is only blue, and for him the world is only yellow. but assumption with lack of investigation is not a good assumption imho, check his posts on Lecroy's DSO upgrade he was happy about... https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/upgrading-mainboard-in-lecroy-dda-3000-(aka-wavepro-7300a)/msg967649/#msg967649
 
so my "assumption" was that he lacks of knowledge on how to upgrade a DSO, so he thought its impossible, but sadly its only for him, that he cannot see, he thought there is only one color, until he saw the other color.

I guess you refer to this post:
 
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/upgrading-mainboard-in-lecroy-dda-3000-(aka-wavepro-7300a)/msg931891/#msg931891
 
Quote
The mainboard is a standard mainboard but forget it, replacing it with a multi-core board will not work for two simple reasons:
 
1. The scope's display is connected via DVO bus to a DVO-to-AGP adapter card which converts the output from the intel chipset graphics into DVO for the display. This card will not work with any other chipset than the i865G, and is unlikely to work with any other mainboard than the intel D865GLC due to the lack of support for the adapter card in the BIOS.
 
2. Even if you somehow manage to upgrade the mainboard, as soon as the OS sees multiple virtual (HypterThreading) or real CPU cores WinXP will switch to the SMP kernel and the scope's hardware drivers will start acting funny and render the scope unusable. The drivers for the WavePro7k (and DDA and SDA descendants) do not work with the SMP kernel of XP, which means no multi-core CPU and no HyperThreading.
 
What you can do is to upgrade the CPU with a faster one. The WavePro/DDA is an X-Stream scope, i.e. it very much relies on the CPU's L2 cache. Upgrade the BIOS of the intel D865GLC mainboard with the last one from the intel site, upgrade RAM to 2GB or 3GB and get a fast Pentium4 processor with 800MHz FSB and 1MB or 2MB L2 cache that is supported by the revision of the mainboard in your scope (intel has compatibility lists somewhere).
 
Just make sure you do not enable HyperThreading as this means you have to re-install Windows or manually fiddle the uniprocessor kernel back in place as disabling HT will not make the driver problems go away.

I may be biased but to me that reads like he's saying just replacing the mobo with a multicore processor is not going to work in that scope. And if you read through the whole thread then you'd see that he was actually right because to make a modern mainboard work people had to write new drivers and make modification to the LCD interface to get it working, so actually he seem to have known pretty well what he was talking about, and it didn't take long until some people who modded their scopes experienced hardware issues ;)
 
In the same thread he was also made aware of a mistake and he quickly accepted and apologized, which is more than what I've seen from many of the regulars here :(
 
Also, from his other posts I gathered that he generally only recommended modest upgrades (like CPU, RAM, SSD) to keep the scope still in a supported configuration because the point of test equipment after all is to provide reliable and dependable data and not a project in itself ;)
 
Maybe it's just me but I can understand why he feels that way. If I started modding scopes at work I would get into so much trouble ;)
 
 
As someone who had a lot of contact with WH and got more help from someone who's literally a stranger than I would have ever expected I have to say I find it very disappointing that some members not only are kicking someone who can't defend himself but also do so with twisted facts. That is low :(


This thread has taken yet another unexpected detour, but it's entirely possible that said posts are deleted, or there were instances of that behavior in private messages.  From moderating forums like this, there are a lot of ways to remove problematic things and there are a lot of ways to keep tabs on members frequently stirring up trouble that are invisible to normal users.

I once asked him and he said everything is there to see. No hidden private messages or deleted posts. So I don’t know :-//
 
 

Offline Mechatrommer

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #82 on: May 30, 2019, 11:24:06 am »
Quote from: Mechatrommer
so my "assumption" was that he lacks of knowledge on how to upgrade a DSO, so he thought its impossible, but sadly its only for him, that he cannot see, he thought there is only one color, until he saw the other color.
I guess you refer to this post:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/upgrading-mainboard-in-lecroy-dda-3000-(aka-wavepro-7300a)/msg931891/#msg931891

I may be biased but to me that reads like he's saying just replacing the mobo with a multicore processor is not going to work in that scope. And if you read through the whole thread then you'd see that he was actually right because to make a modern mainboard work people had to write new drivers and make modification to the LCD interface to get it working, so actually he seem to have known pretty well what he was talking about, and it didn't take long until some people who modded their scopes experienced hardware issues ;)
no argument agreed 100% nevermind on re-reading that thread, i've read that thread from page 1 till the end, me and dajmasta are some members who involved in the DSO mod in that thread. i've waited many weeks/months/years until i found GHz DSO and VNA that suit my need and price, thats why we are giving advice. i also read WH posts in many other threads, very useful and helpful. except his advise are based on his own experience (and thats normal as we all do the same when posting in forum), thats why he didnt recommend multicore system as he has no knowledge building drivers. but sadly some people may take this too literally (that the world is not yellow period). i believe if he is still around, he will be happily link to the multicore driver and changed his mind. he is just a normal mortal like us, still i dont see any good reason why he is banned, his post contained many useful facts, but relating to Lecroy DSO only.

otoh yes this thread has went sour when someone started troll on unrelated issue, but yet havent provide a better alternative. granted it can be used for food for thought but we need solution rather than dont do this, dont do that. this thread is about "Nice, older DSO advice" i've (and some others) provided links where we can buy 1-6GHz 16-20GSps DSO at less than $4K mainly because preferences to BW and sample rate that is not available in other brand at the price and cant be emulated in any kind of workaround. if someone else think other feature such as peak detect is more important, he should provide an example to which used scope to buy and let the reader decide. i may change mind if there is better alternative even if its say 20% more expensive etc. but as far as peak detect is concerned, i considered that matter is solved for me with my $400 DS1054Z :P there maybe older 500MHz Keysight DSO with peak detect at $2-4K, but if someone prefer BW and GSps, i dont think there is alternative other than LeCroy in current used market, if you miss that, i wish you people good luck with your projects, the offers have become rarer. you maybe happy with lower BW peak detect scope and sucks on LeCroy scope, but thats the decision you've made and should be respected, but then we also should respect others opinion, there is no need for butfark fight, fwiw...
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Offline rsjsouza

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #83 on: May 30, 2019, 02:46:11 pm »
This also reads a lot different. He doesn't say it will cause problems, he says it won't be very fast and may well have side effects.
 
Later in the thread he replied to you with this:
 
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/show-us-your-square-wave/msg597693/#msg597693
 
Quote
Just because you were lucky doesn't mean that such mods are always troublefree. In fact, it might well be that your mod has other side effects you just didn't notice (yet). Just because something looks ok doesn't necessarily mean it is. Also, do you know how many different PCI 1Gbps network adapters exist? And just because you didn't see side effects with one makes you think it will always be allright? Hopefully not.
 
The simple fact is that these scopes are not designed as expandable systems, and just because you can plug in some PCI card doesn't mean it can be expanded like a standard PC. The scope as sold is the only supported (i.e. guranteed to work) configuration, aside from a few upgrades offered by LeCroy like CPU and RAM (which even if done with generic parts should be pretty painless). And really, it should be pretty obvious to an EE why on a single PCI bus with a theoretical max transfer rate of 133MB/s a 1Gbps network adapter (which in a good environment transfers between 90-100MB/s) doesn't leave much room for anything else. And something like 33MB/s isn't much for an acquisition system which captures over 20GB data per second, and while not everything in the sample memory goes to the CPU, everything that you want to see on the screen or that you want to process in any way does. Well, you do the math.
 
In addition, the acquisition system in these LeCroy scopes definitely *is* timing sensitive. I've been bitten by this myself when I upgraded my CPU (hint: never enable Hyperthreading on a WP7k(A) or WM8k(A), unless you want to reinstall your OS).
 
This aside, "just works" isn't really good enough if you want to use your test kit professionally, where people generally want to have something that is supported by the manufacturer and where problems are solved by their support. If you modded your scope most manufacturers simply tell you to piss off, and rightfully so.

So his point was really that the faster adapter is unlikely to give you a notable speed boost but comes with the risk of side effects. That reads a lot different from "Then it was about how adding a 1Gb Ethernet card would cause problems." :-//
 
So would you mind to clarify your statements? Because that reads a lot like you're twisting facts :--
Although you have some fair points, IMHO this one is not. In my eyes, Wuerstchenhund's above post pretty much discourages any attempts to modifications with pure opinion and not facts. That is a typical manufacturer's speech against modifications to any piece of hardware.
 
As someone who had a lot of contact with WH and got more help from someone who's literally a stranger than I would have ever expected I have to say I find it very disappointing that some members not only are kicking someone who can't defend himself but also do so with twisted facts. That is low :(
It is easy to look at someone else's posts many years after the fact and forget the emotions involved during the debate at the time. There is a chance Joe and Mecha didn't look back at the posts and were only recalling what they felt at the time, which is a fair mistake but not low. Anyone else here could have made the same mistake.

This thread has taken yet another unexpected detour, but it's entirely possible that said posts are deleted, or there were instances of that behavior in private messages.  From moderating forums like this, there are a lot of ways to remove problematic things and there are a lot of ways to keep tabs on members frequently stirring up trouble that are invisible to normal users.

I once asked him and he said everything is there to see. No hidden private messages or deleted posts. So I don’t know :-//
Although I saw some of his posts as bellicose/angry at times, he was really not the only one responsible for this - many other users that most probably reported him were equally part of the problem and are still around. At the time he was given timeout one or a few times to cool off and went back at the same pace with the same attitude - we don't have the full story here, and the moderators simply became fed up with the number of reports as it was mentioned at the time. It may have been a mob attack, but I can only speculate. 
« Last Edit: May 30, 2019, 02:47:53 pm by rsjsouza »
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Offline David Hess

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #84 on: May 30, 2019, 03:35:03 pm »
1 million waveforms per seconds sounds great but to me that's just marketing wank (others have done it before, too). Update rates are way overrated ;)

1 million waveforms per second is about high acquisition rates for low blind time.  There is some minimum dead-time between acquisitions which limits it.  This is what matters when searching for rare signal characteristics.

Screen updates rates are completely different and about human factors and usability.  Ultimately this will be limited by LCD refresh rate yet most DSOs are considerably slower under all or some conditions.
 

Offline joeqsmith

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #85 on: May 30, 2019, 05:09:51 pm »
i thought you were on sales too selling brand name fuse. after several years of happy living with some strand of wire as fuse, I have to say your advice was flawed ;) but that just a joke, an idiom that i dont know how to say in english.... returning what a person says about other back to him... you maybe think the world is only blue, and for him the world is only yellow. but assumption with lack of investigation is not a good assumption imho, check his posts on Lecroy's DSO upgrade he was happy about... https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/upgrading-mainboard-in-lecroy-dda-3000-(aka-wavepro-7300a)/msg967649/#msg967649

so my "assumption" was that he lacks of knowledge on how to upgrade a DSO, so he thought its impossible, but sadly its only for him, that he cannot see, he thought there is only one color, until he saw the other color. after looking at most of his post, i dont think he is an oscilloscope angel nor guru nor a walking encyclopedia, he is maybe just an overly enthusiastic and experienced Lecroy DSO user, he maybe have more knowledge and details on that, but if we ask him about Tektronix or Agilent DSO, then he can be as clueless as others. otoh i tried to find which Wuerstchenhund's post that was really insulting but i cant find one, so i guess some fools who think the world is only blue made a report on him.

I only sell the finest counterfeit SIBA fuses and UNI-T meters.   All joking aside, I doubt I would have ever made that wire powered cork gun had it not been for your posts.   It's amazing to see just how much expansion you can get out of a little wire.   

I also don't remember him insulting anyone but I wasn't following his every post. 

...

That's a lot of effort you went to.  Sadly it was wasted on me.   

I would need to try and hunt down his posts about me using the PCs to post process the data.  He was suggesting this all be done on the DSO.  Of course, my scopes are all old and don't have much computing power compared with a modern PC.    I did make a couple of videos demonstrating the throughput gains after changing over to 1Gb.   A very nice upgrade.   

Offline joeqsmith

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #86 on: May 30, 2019, 05:38:29 pm »
Although you have some fair points, IMHO this one is not. In my eyes, Wuerstchenhund's above post pretty much discourages any attempts to modifications with pure opinion and not facts. That is a typical manufacturer's speech against modifications to any piece of hardware.

Partly why I was guessing he was in sales.  Seems he mentioned traveling to many large companies.  Sales....     He made a few videos but I think the ones were to sell the 64Xi he had.   

It is easy to look at someone else's posts many years after the fact and forget the emotions involved during the debate at the time. There is a chance Joe and Mecha didn't look back at the posts and were only recalling what they felt at the time, which is a fair mistake but not low. Anyone else here could have made the same mistake.

Very possible.  Seems I poked him a few times on this site afterwards.  Mainly to let him know things were still working fine and I hadn't ran into troubles.  I don't recall this leading to any sort of conflict.  It's really just a data point after all.       

Although I saw some of his posts as bellicose/angry at times, he was really not the only one responsible for this - many other users that most probably reported him were equally part of the problem and are still around. At the time he was given timeout one or a few times to cool off and went back at the same pace with the same attitude - we don't have the full story here, and the moderators simply became fed up with the number of reports as it was mentioned at the time. It may have been a mob attack, but I can only speculate.

This is what I remember as well.   I was amazed they banned him and not some of the others he would debate with.   

While cleaning up the DMM thread, there was a member "Oldway" who was also banned.  I started reading their posts and again, really didn't strike me as someone I would have thought would need to be banned.    I just assume its based on their targeted group. 

I've somehow escaped being banned.  Although, Dave did pull some of my comments. I don't remember what the topic was or why he pulled them.  It seems I posted, he pulled it, I thought I had forgotten to press enter and reposted, he pulled it again.  :-DD :palm:   This was about the closest I think I have got as Simon fired a warning shot.  :-DD 
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/a-look-at-the-uni-t-ut210e/msg1045994/#msg1045994



   
 
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Offline Mechatrommer

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #87 on: May 30, 2019, 06:02:34 pm »
All joking aside, I doubt I would have ever made that wire powered cork gun had it not been for your posts.   It's amazing to see just how much expansion you can get out of a little wire.   
another entertainment for you (attached) that has seen action recently. i wont say much as it will encourage others, the purpose is written on there, just note the atomized copper around the inner side of the transparent case. saved me a fortune from buying legit stuffs. all these learnt when i saw a techy shop replaced his mains fuse (before the dist. box) many years ago. ;)

I was amazed they banned him and not some of the others he would debate with.   
thats why i feel cold on this forum ever since i saw such occurences. better to only reply to threads of really interesting/related. even some simple technical issues/questions in beginner or technical sections i will choose to ignore, let others solve it, as this forum has gotten famous anyway and the #1 admin is doing the same, so i've blended the culture to myself, i think thats the wiser thing to do around here. if there is conflict, better stay away esp if its ambiguous yellow or blue, only reply to whats obvious such as facts and that probably cant be encountered back by replier. a wise man once said... i can debate with a wise guy and win, but i will lose debating with a fool. you can be right on this forum but yet you still can get banned. fwiw.
Nature: Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness (Stephen L. Talbott): Its now indisputable that... organisms “expertise” contextualizes its genome, and its nonsense to say that these powers are under the control of the genome being contextualized - Barbara McClintock
 

Offline jjoonathan

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #88 on: May 30, 2019, 09:28:35 pm »
Quote
I was amazed they banned him and not some of the others he would debate with.

Community management isn't always about doing what's fair to the individual. If a community has a problem with contentious discussions and those contentious discussions tend to nucleate around a particular individual, the rational choice for the community manager is to remove the individual, even if the manager agrees with everything the individual is saying, even if the individual conducts themselves appropriately while their sparring partners do not. It's not fair, but the community comes first.

There's a chilling effect, but the stakes are low, and this doesn't just scale down the consequences, it also makes them less negative. When the government or a corporate executive create a chilling effect, it often works to suppress inconvenient but important truths. It encourages problems to fester and grow until they can't be ignored. Here, there are no big, inconvenient problems to fester and grow. We're debating oscilloscope models and features. A lack of peak detect does not fester and grow until it topples a company or an economy. You just work around it if you have to and that's the end of it. The chilling effect discourages escalation but doesn't encourage hiding dirty laundry because the stakes are too low to generate dirty laundry in the first place. Therefore, the chilling effect is less of a problem than your intuition might suggest, because your intuition is calibrated against chilling effects in the workplace or in society, whereas this is a chilling effect in a hobby form. More of a "chill out and peace" effect than a "chill and freeze to death" effect :)
« Last Edit: May 30, 2019, 09:32:17 pm by jjoonathan »
 

Offline Mechatrommer

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #89 on: May 30, 2019, 10:58:26 pm »
the rational choice for the community manager is to remove the individual, even if the manager agrees with everything the individual is saying, even if the individual conducts themselves appropriately while their sparring partners do not. It's not fair, but the community comes first.
so let the community decides? if its filled with fools, then getting banned is actually a relieve from a curse ;) partly i believe your point has something to do with "monetization", this forum is the admin's full time income, so its no wonder why.
Nature: Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness (Stephen L. Talbott): Its now indisputable that... organisms “expertise” contextualizes its genome, and its nonsense to say that these powers are under the control of the genome being contextualized - Barbara McClintock
 

Offline joeqsmith

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #90 on: May 31, 2019, 12:54:05 am »
so let the community decides? if its filled with fools, then getting banned is actually a relieve from a curse ;) partly i believe your point has something to do with "monetization", this forum is the admin's full time income, so its no wonder why.
:-DD   I think in some cases, yes!   After that bit of drama on the UT210e, I posted about those last few hardware changes I made and never visited that thread again until yesterday.  It gets to a point it's just not worth the effort.   As suggested, the stakes are low and the only consequence is that I am no longer part of the discussion.  A blessing for some I'm sure.   :-DD

It appears like "breaker tester"??   :-DD :scared: 

Back on topic, I'm still lost about the 100MHz FPGA projects.  I was running some home made wire wrapped boards at 100MHz back in the 90s.   It's not uncommon anymore to clock them above 500MHz.   Then again, I will fully admit I have a problem with speed and a soft spot for old test equipment. 

Offline 0culusTopic starter

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #91 on: May 31, 2019, 12:58:01 am »
You need a fast scope to properly see even a 100 MHz clock signal. That's the benchmark I'm using. My 7904A, using a 7A19 amplifier with a P6201 FET probe isn't even enough.
 

Offline joeqsmith

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #92 on: May 31, 2019, 01:23:13 am »
True.  I have a couple of differential FET probes for digital, but mostly use resistive probes.   I was playing around with a cheap Arty board a few years ago.  Pictures were taken with a LeCroy 64Xi.   Now that I have owned it for a few years, it's not a bad scope for it's age.  The case is poor quality.   There are times it's nice to have something a bit faster.     Pictures showing that same home made oscillator on the 64Xi and the 8500A.   

I wouldn't mind having a new DSO for home but by budget is not nearly as big as my addiction requires.     

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/typical-speed-of-fpgas/msg1274875/#msg1274875


Offline james_s

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #93 on: May 31, 2019, 04:31:15 am »
You need a fast scope to properly see even a 100 MHz clock signal. That's the benchmark I'm using. My 7904A, using a 7A19 amplifier with a P6201 FET probe isn't even enough.

A lot of people seem to get really hung up on this. It's true of course, technically speaking, but it doesn't mean you can't get by with a more modest instrument. All test equipment lies to you under some circumstances, the key is knowing the limitations of your gear and knowing how to interpret what it's telling you. A square wave with very fast rise and fall times will be rounded slightly on any scope, in most cases this is not really an issue, unless you specifically need to measure the rise or fall time.
 

Offline Mr Nutts

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #94 on: May 31, 2019, 07:35:09 am »
...

That's a lot of effort you went to.  Sadly it was wasted on me.

Disappointing but can't say I'm surprised :(

Quote
I would need to try and hunt down his posts about me using the PCs to post process the data.  He was suggesting this all be done on the DSO.

I couldn't find anything about that so maybe you could point me towards this message that shows "how he was going on about not using a PC to post process data" :-//

Especially since as shown your other complaints clearly weren't exactly truthful :(


Although you have some fair points, IMHO this one is not. In my eyes, Wuerstchenhund's above post pretty much discourages any attempts to modifications with pure opinion and not facts. That is a typical manufacturer's speech against modifications to any piece of hardware.

Partly why I was guessing he was in sales.  Seems he mentioned traveling to many large companies.  Sales..

His company is managing a few large labs around the globe and he regularly buys test equipment for them which is probably why he knows so much about test instruments  :)
 
He also mentioned what he’s doing several times :)
 
I don’t think any sales guy would have that amount of knowledge, not just about Lecroy but about all the other big brands as well, and certainly not to that level ;)
« Last Edit: May 31, 2019, 07:59:51 am by Mr Nutts »
 

Offline Mr Nutts

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #95 on: May 31, 2019, 07:42:04 am »
1 million waveforms per seconds sounds great but to me that's just marketing wank (others have done it before, too). Update rates are way overrated ;)

1 million waveforms per second is about high acquisition rates for low blind time.  There is some minimum dead-time between acquisitions which limits it.  This is what matters when searching for rare signal characteristics.

High update rates seem to be pretty pointless for searching rare events :(

https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/blog/the-truth-about-oscilloscope-waveform-update-rates-and-why-not-to-fall-for-it.1514/
 

Offline joeqsmith

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #96 on: May 31, 2019, 10:39:36 am »
...

That's a lot of effort you went to.  Sadly it was wasted on me.

Disappointing but can't say I'm surprised :(
As you shouldn't be.   


Quote
I would need to try and hunt down his posts about me using the PCs to post process the data.  He was suggesting this all be done on the DSO.

I couldn't find anything about that so maybe you could point me towards this message that shows "how he was going on about not using a PC to post process data" :-//

Especially since as shown your other complaints clearly weren't exactly truthful :(

If you are really interested in finding this information, it may be difficult.  Besides this one forum, there were a couple of others that we were both on.  He used a different name.   You could try asking him to see what he remembers. 

*** Also, you used the word complaints.  that's your perception and not something I stated.   I'm not thinking I had any real problems with the guy.    I know he had contacted the moderators at least once about problems he was having with a member and the fact he was banned, no doubt there were complaints from both sides.  I doubt he had ever contacted them over anything I posted.   I did respond to a recent post he made to let him know the SSDs were still alive but he didn't respond.   I no longer use the groups so our paths don't cross very often. 

His company is managing a few large labs around the globe and he regularly buys test equipment for them which is probably why he knows so much about test instruments  :)
 
He also mentioned what he’s doing several times :)
 
I don’t think any sales guy would have that amount of knowledge, not just about Lecroy but about all the other big brands as well, and certainly not to that level ;)

He NEVER once showed using the equipment to do ANYTHING.  I brought this up a few times.  Again, a sign of typical salesman, not that it matters.  Just my observation.   
« Last Edit: May 31, 2019, 11:21:48 am by joeqsmith »
 

Online 2N3055

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #97 on: May 31, 2019, 12:44:54 pm »
1 million waveforms per seconds sounds great but to me that's just marketing wank (others have done it before, too). Update rates are way overrated ;)

1 million waveforms per second is about high acquisition rates for low blind time.  There is some minimum dead-time between acquisitions which limits it.  This is what matters when searching for rare signal characteristics.

High update rates seem to be pretty pointless for searching rare events :(

https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/blog/the-truth-about-oscilloscope-waveform-update-rates-and-why-not-to-fall-for-it.1514/

Before writing  anything else, I'm sorry we got into argument. And what I write further is not a provocation or anything.

I just want to discuss this, fact based, like you (and also me) like it.

Let me go by the numbers it is easier to be clear and to avoid language barrier.

1. 1 MWfms/sec IS a marketing gimmick, and for more than a few reasons. Most of all, at most timebases it won't be that fast, if you have trigger holdoff it won't be that fast, if you have trigger delay it won't be that fast.

2. Short retrigger time IS NOT a gimmick. Short retrigger time is a positive consequence of them chasing 1 MWPS. That is a real benefit they don't market. In interactive, visual mode scope feels analog like. Also in segmented mode, you don't miss sequential events..

3. If you are trying to characterise some signal that is well defined as how it should look (serial comm bus, clock etc ), something for what you have a clear specification, then staring in the screen for something to happen is definitely NOT best way to capture anomalies and best use of your time. With that kind of signal and based on specification you can devise set of triggers, searches and stats that you let run for few hours (or days, doesn't matter) and when you come back you get stats and your offenders will wait for you neatly stored in history buffer.
He is SOO right about that.  Funny thing is, you can do the same thing on Keysight and all other scopes. Heck, little Rigol 1000Z has so many advanced triggers like many of the midrange scopes of the yore (not very good documentation that will explain how to use it though). That kind of workflow is nothing exclusive to LeCroy. It's just since on LeCroy that is prefered workflow, they explain it and endorse it, because it plays to the strengths of their platform.

BUT also, in a pinch you could enable persistence and go to lunch and, when you get back, you take a look at the screen to see if there was a glitch. It will catch it, but my biggest problem with that is that you won't know when it happened, how it happened and have no way to know that. You will just know something did happen, and now you still have to catch the culprit. So you still have to devise detection protocol, set triggers etc.
So that is only partially useful. But it does provide differential diagnosis, meaning that if you don't catch anything with persistence, and you didn't catch anything with a protocol of various triggers, it enhances probability you are glitch free. So IT IS useful for that. By itself NOT much.

4. If you are working on designs where you are scoping (is that a word?) just some nodes in a circuit, or you are designing something, signal will be nothing like clock or something that can be easily explained with few rules. In that case it is all about you and not the scope. Any scope will at that moment have some good and some bad things. Generally, what is useful is good measurements, history(segmented) buffers, search, stats... Some will LIKE fast interaction, some will NEED deep analysis. I like both, Keysight for interactive, Picoscope to get data on PC and then i can do anything I like. Use of brain is not optional here, no universal answer. Workflow will depend both on problem at hand and every individual skill-set, habits, and how people LIKE to work. Some people have no problem whipping up a custom analysis in Mathlab or Labview in just few minutes, and may actually prefer it that way. Some will insist that scope has to have certain analysis built in so they can just use it. Your mileage can vary.

5. Thing about Mr W. is that he doesn't explain why and how he came to the conclusions he proclaims "The Truth". It is not that he's wrong about the topic (he is not right about everything but mostly he makes a good point.), but also didn't provide not even a thought process how he came to his conclusions, much less concrete examples to make his case stick. He just say "this is stupid and waste of time" and "this is solution for all problems".  Long time ago when I read his original posts here, I got curious and did a little research. And I realized that he made a lot of good points but his causalities were not always correct. He was basing his assumptions on marketing material and positions of manufacturers. So he concluded that short memory / high WUR scopes (like Keysight) are inferior to  long memory / low WUR (like LeCroy) scope, because on LeCroy you CAN use triggers to accomplish so much more than on Keysight with high WUR and persistence. Which was misdirection in terms.

Correct conclusion is that staring at the screen, looking for a glitch is INFERIOR and LESS productive way of doing it, as opposed to setting triggers, segmented memory and automating search for anomalies. Problem is that Keysight can do that to, the trigger way, for most of the part. Lecroy scopes in that price range and class (Wavesurfers) have none of the advanced features of high end Lecroy machines that makes them so awesome. On lower end Lecroy triggers are not more intelligent than ones on Keysight  (or Rigol to that matter), and Wavescan is just fancy name for a search.

Fact that Keysight trumpets about WUR and catching glitches with persistence doesn't mean I have to use it that way. So I use Keysight like he uses LeCroy, with prudent choice of triggers and segmented memory, using pretty advanced search capabilities to drill down further. And it works, well. He was right about it, thanks a lot for that. But his dogma was you need a LeCroy to do so. You don't. On high end Lecroy with advanced analysis options enabled, you will do it faster, better, easier. But that workflow works well even on lowly Rigol, and it works well.

Actually, exactly that type of workflow enables scope that doesn't have much memory (like Keysight) to not show that. Long memory is not that important in that case because you only capture what is of interest and ignore hours of signal you don't care about. So it actually complements Keysight well, hiding it's imperfections, instead of making it unusable.

We could go on for years like this. Everybody will protect their choices, their cognitive biases, their way.

Fact is that a good, working LeCroy Waverunner  in a good shape is a hell of a scope. If you can enable advanced analysis options, you will have a scope that you can develop stuff NASA would be proud of.  OTOH, some people only need scope for servicing stuff, and they want fast and familiar.

All the best,
 
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Offline David Hess

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #98 on: May 31, 2019, 03:14:14 pm »
1 million waveforms per second is about high acquisition rates for low blind time.  There is some minimum dead-time between acquisitions which limits it.  This is what matters when searching for rare signal characteristics.

High update rates seem to be pretty pointless for searching rare events :(

https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/blog/the-truth-about-oscilloscope-waveform-update-rates-and-why-not-to-fall-for-it.1514/

That article is discussing the difference between low blind time (high acquisition rate, low rearm time) and specialized triggers.  If I do not know what trigger I need, then special triggers are useless.  If I use the magical "trigger on weird", then it can still deliver a false negative.  Who knows what it is triggering on?  With DPO operation, it just comes down to statistics.

Both methods are suitable for finding rare events but under different circumstances.  Triggers work 100% of the time for finding the known.  High acquisition rates work 95% of the time (this depends on the design and application, 100% is possible) for the unknown.
 
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Offline 0culusTopic starter

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Re: Nice, older DSO advice
« Reply #99 on: May 31, 2019, 04:49:12 pm »
You need a fast scope to properly see even a 100 MHz clock signal. That's the benchmark I'm using. My 7904A, using a 7A19 amplifier with a P6201 FET probe isn't even enough.

A lot of people seem to get really hung up on this. It's true of course, technically speaking, but it doesn't mean you can't get by with a more modest instrument. All test equipment lies to you under some circumstances, the key is knowing the limitations of your gear and knowing how to interpret what it's telling you. A square wave with very fast rise and fall times will be rounded slightly on any scope, in most cases this is not really an issue, unless you specifically need to measure the rise or fall time.

Yes, I know this. Accurate rise time measurement at 100 MHz is why I want a scope that's fast enough to do it.
 


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