Products > Test Equipment
Upgrading the Hantek DSO4072C and DS4104C oscilloscopes bandwidth up to 250MHz
<< < (9/15) > >>
fer662:
Just got myself a DSO4084c as a first scope after evaluating a few alternatives. It was the cheapest I could get here (the whimsical land of Peronia) with 4 channels and decent bandwidth (and already having read about the possibility of upgrade to 250mhz) and I probably paid close to what you'd pay for a much more decent scope there (around 600 bucks). Now I'm pondering whether it's worth it to me to do the procedure, since it appears the probes that came with it (pp-90) only go up to 80mhz. Is this generally a hard limit or would I see any difference with the upgraded bandwidth of the scope with these same probes? I know I could buy better probes in the future but honestly it's probably going to be a while until I need something like that since I'm just getting started with oscilloscopes and I'm just a hobbist.
Microcheap:
The maximum bandwidth (BW) of an oscilloscope or probe is not a "hard limit", they won't stop working after reaching this limit. In theory, the specified BW is the point where an input signal is attenuated by 3db, after this point, the amplitude of the input signal starts to fall sharply, that means, you still can see the signal, but its amplitude will be attenuated. And this is not a precise limit, normally the manufacturers leave some margin so in practice, the actual BW is greater than specified.

If you use a 80MHz probe with a 250MHz BW oscilloscope the BW of your system will be limited by your probe. I would recommend an article from Keysight which explains that better than I can: https://community.keysight.com/community/keysight-blogs/oscilloscopes/blog/2016/09/01/what-is-oscilloscope-system-bandwidth-and-how-do-i-find-the-bandwidth-of-the-scope-probe

200MHz and 300MHz probes are available relatively cheap on ebay or aliexpress but I can't attest its quality as I never used one.
Or, you can do your own high speed probe 8) : http://paulorenato.com/index.php/93
fer662:
Got it! I'll probably grab a higher BW probe next time i have to buy something in AliExpress and the same seller has one. I'm super happy with the scope so far!
Simon_RL:
Microcheap, thank you very much for providing this information. Unfortunately I recently bought my DSO4204C before I found out about scope hacking.

Fortunately I did find out before I bought my HDG6082B. Got to say I am very happy with is AWG/Function Generator, it is great value. Anyway I am planning on attempting to apply the upgrade, hopefully I can get it to 200M. I am planning to read out the eprom as per Microcheaps instructions and will share all findings and results in this thread.

My only concern is a lack of backup and restore, in case of a total failure. Is anyone able to provide advice and/or assistance with the creation of the backup and restore files used for the Oscilloscope? I come from a programming background (C/C++ in Unix Environment), but am totally new to embedded systems.
kutukvpavel:
To Simon:
The ultimate backup is a collections of images of all ROMs the device contains, made with (a) suitable programmer(s). In case anything goes wrong you reflash the ROMs and the scope is again factory-new. However, this is really inconvenient ([de]soldering) and mostly unnecessary (current firmware doesn't seem to counteract any sort of tampering). So, an average backup is just an image of the flash-rom that contains the firmware (made using UART connection to a running scope).
I don't think you should be worried that much if you are familiar with C/C++ programming (it's fairly low-level compared to .NET environment, for example, where I departed from some time ago, having to learn C/C++ and various embedded stuff simultaneously).
Check out the backup method link in the first post.

Btw, there is a longer thread on Hantek DSO5000 series hack: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/hantek-tekway-dso-hack-get-200mhz-bw-for-free
You may find backup how-to-s there too. Adjusting them to suit this model should be bot that hard, after all it's just a Linux distro and a flash chip that may differ.
Just in case, AFAIR, the OP is chinese-speaking guy who delivers information from chinese community here (you'd be surprised how much stuff you can find in the chinese segment if the Net, many of chinese developers of such devices actually share source codes etc). He briefly mentioned that DSO4004 series is completely different in terms of software, but if he's still around he would probably be able to help. Especially with firmware mods.

To All:
I'm about to get a DSO4084-series scope to hack it to 250MHz. Does anyone have any recent hacking experience with those? Do I still have to change a single text file only? Has anyone tested actual rise time before/after the hack? AFAIR, chinese manufacturers made some attempts to prevent hacking (at least make it more complicated) for 5000-series scopes at some point in time, therefore I'm a bit worried.
Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page
There was an error while thanking
Thanking...

Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod