Products > Test Equipment
Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: tautech on June 02, 2018, 12:07:37 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on June 01, 2018, 11:36:05 pm ---
--- Quote from: tautech on June 01, 2018, 09:53:00 pm ---Small difference; lowly DSO vs TOL professional CRO, fair comparison do you think ? :palm:
--- End quote ---
That's only one comparison, and not a very enlightening one.
Another, arguably more useful, is to compare what you can get for a fixed price - in this case a couple of hundred pounds or so.
--- End quote ---
The last 4 CRO's I've acquired I got for nicks and my time like anyone else's need be factored into the real cost of getting a CRO and fixing it or keeping it going. ...
--- End quote ---
The "cost of your time" depends on the individual. Some are cash-rich time-poor, some are time-rich cash-poor.
The cost can also be negative, e.g. if repairing something allows you to learn something that is later valued by, say, a potential employer.
While I advise beginners against trying to repair scopes, I get irritated by people that claim that only DSOs should be considered and/or that DSOs are better in all respects. Neither is true.
Mr. Scram:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on June 02, 2018, 08:22:40 am ---The "cost of your time" depends on the individual. Some are cash-rich time-poor, some are time-rich cash-poor.
The cost can also be negative, e.g. if repairing something allows you to learn something that is later valued by, say, a potential employer.
While I advise beginners against trying to repair scopes, I get irritated by people that claim that only DSOs should be considered and/or that DSOs are better in all respects. Neither is true.
--- End quote ---
In what regard are CROs better and why aren't companies capitalizing on that?
Specmaster:
--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on June 02, 2018, 08:26:24 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on June 02, 2018, 08:22:40 am ---The "cost of your time" depends on the individual. Some are cash-rich time-poor, some are time-rich cash-poor.
The cost can also be negative, e.g. if repairing something allows you to learn something that is later valued by, say, a potential employer.
While I advise beginners against trying to repair scopes, I get irritated by people that claim that only DSOs should be considered and/or that DSOs are better in all respects. Neither is true.
--- End quote ---
In what regard are CROs better and why aren't companies capitalizing on that?
--- End quote ---
I don't think that anyone is claiming CROs are better, both CROs and DSOs have advantages over each other. Apart the obvious like the higher cost of a DSO over a 2nd hand CRO, and the size and weight differences, there are differences in the way that they work, screen size etc.
DSOs are good at capturing signals, storing them and allowing them to be displayed /examined in many ways which most CROs cannot. CROs in the main are live only devices with smaller screens and earlier ones do not have screen cursors and wealth of information they can provide unlike DSOs which all have them.
Fact is however that a CRO is more likely the way that beginners will be learning their scope manship on purely on the grounds of cost alone. What makes transistion to DSOs harder is that the interface is so vastly difference with many functions tucked away behind many levels of a menu system requiring multiple pushes of a button to reach.
Fact is that in reality a good electronics bench really needs both of them to accomplish different tasks.
I just wonder if the DSOs of today will still be around on say 20 let alone 40 like so many of the CROs are?
From mobile device so predictive text might have struck again [emoji83]
Berni:
Im guessing they wont be around after 40 years. Most modern scopes keep there firmware in flash memory, it has a data retention life time. To make it even worse the modern flash is ever crappier as they are primarily optimizing it for more memory density rather than reliability.
We already seen this happen where the Keysight X2000 and X3000 scopes would fail to boot due to flash corruption. It was apparently a issue that the bootloader did not use ECC checks and eventually over time a bit got flipped inside the bootloader in a small number of these scopes, but in enough of them for Keysight to recognize it as a issue and offer free repair for them.
Its actually common practice for the last 15 years that NAND flash memory has ECC codes in it. This high density type of flash memory was known to be unreliable so ECC was introduced as a standard feature in NAND flash. Each page of memory page is slightly larger than a power of two number, the extra bytes being used to store a ECC code for the rest of the page. On each read operation the ECC code is checked by the flash controller and in the case of an error the code is used to correct the flipped bit and the corrected data is written back to the page to fix it before being checked again to make sure the fix worked. Additionally there is an area where even newly manufactured chips contain a table of bad pages, the table is meant to also be updated by the memory controller if it finds any new stuck bits. So as long as flash is constantly being used it does tend to self heal itself even if its being read from, but obviously as the specified data retention time comes closer and closer its going to start getting worse and worse until too many bits flip and the ECC code can't recover them anymore.
If this was not bad enough the smart engineers at memory manufacturers realized that you don't have to fill a flash memory cell up all the way, you could have various levels of "fullness". So if you store 4 different analog levels in a cell you can store 2 bits per cell, turning a 8GB chip into a 16GB one. This is called MLC flash and as you might imagine its even worse in terms of reliability as it takes less of a drift in the cell to flip a bit. Yet due to the density benefits this kind of flash is ever more popular.
So yes my MSO6000 scope will probably be dead in the year 2050 while your dual trace 20MHz Tek is still going.
There might be some hope for the MSO9000 scope. It has a PC inside of it so most of its firmware is on a hard drive. While the acquisition board is running all FPGAs that tend to have firmware stored in offboard low density NOR flash chips that are much more reliable. It won't be fun finding a replacement motherboard for it tho as anythyng made in 2050 will likely not be compatible, or i likely would not be able to install Windows 7 on it.
bd139:
I don’t expect a DS1054Z to last more than about 3 years. Anything after that is a bonus.
Then again if we divide the initial cost including inflation of some of the analogue scopes over the lifespan, the rigol works out cheaper if you have to replace it every three years anyway. 7603 with two verticals and a delayed timebase wasn’t cheap! Over $18,000 in 2015 prices according to w140.com
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