First or second, really. Teledyne LeCroy are shiny to look at, but super expensive for what you get, and don't always have the best UI.
I'll also put in a vote for Rohde and Schwarz, at least for the really really high-end gear.
@zetasyanthis our work got a LeCroy oscilloscope just recently and i have to say their UI is excellent, at least now
we haven't used any of their older equipment so it might be terrible, but their current one i would say has slightly better UI than Tek and on par with Keysight
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@zetasyanthis this might be why so much of their marketing material is "look how fantastic the UI is, we spent tons of time and effort making it as good as possible", and advertising their scopes as having MAUI, "Most Advanced UI"
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Yeah, sounds like they fixed that up a bit, which is great! And I think a lot of the trouble with UIs in the last little while is about dealing with just how much crap these devices can do now. O.o;
@zetasyanthis the big draw of LeCroy scopes right now are
- the 12-bit resolution
- the high channel count (seriously they have an 80-channel scope!! that is not an extraneous zero!!!!)
- *really* big screens to fit lots of data
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...I'm not an advantage of lecroy scopes that's just my signature
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How the fuck does one even... 80 channels??? *googles furiously*
@zetasyanthis it's their labmaster 10Zi, which is a modular scope that you can just add more channels to by buying more input modules
it supports up to 80 channels at 36 GHz, or fewer channels at 100 GHz, and it's completely ridiculous
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I think my heart just fluttered a little. 20 channels @ 100 freaking GHz?????
@zetasyanthis *yes* it's completely absurd and i want one but there is no way in hell we'll ever be able to afford one
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Given the FSW26 (granted, a spec an, not a scope) was about $300k new with those licenses, I don't even want to think about what that costs. O.o;
@zetasyanthis i don't know how much they cost but i would assume millions
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I kind of want to quote one randomly now and see what happens, but I'm pretty sure someone from within the company I work with would end up contacted by them and would go WTFH. XD
@zetasyanthis they do also have more affordable (for a given value of affordable) 8-channel scopes, which is more than most though i think tek and keysight both have 8-channel options now too
and of course most scopes are available in an MSO form with like 16 or so digital channels in addition to the 4/8/80 analog channels
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@zetasyanthis logic analyzers are pretty handy sometimes!
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Oh yeah. Most of the work I've done is with MSOs, but I think the fastest scope I've ever cracked out was a 20GHz Tektronix unit.
@zetasyanthis yeah the one our work got was 1 GHz (we're probably going to get a 10 GHz scope later, probably also a lecroy unless another brand is much cheaper just because familiarity and interoperability without adapters)
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Used to do some work in satellite comms with super precision timing. :)
The RF energy that entered the ADC card timestamped to within half a nanosecond on packetized output from an FPGA sort of stuff. (RF distribution these days is done via UDP multicast streams on high-speed networks.)
I had a couple of these in that lab, along with one of the cleanup oscillators, too. Phase noise is such a bitch. XD
Gotta say, there is something positively delightful about having a little 4U box humming away in your rack with just a couple LEDs on the front. Label? "Primary Frequency Standard" :D
@zetasyanthis oh hey, microsemi, most of our coworkers used to work there!
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@zetasyanthis yeah we're doing semiconductor design work (well, us specifically the testing, our coworkers do the design)
our most recent project, just got the first results with it today, is a device for measuring the reverse recovery time of a diode
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I was wondering what you were doing. Figured it was semiconductor focused. :P
@zetasyanthis I can't really go into too much detail because NDA, but yeah!
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You never can, sadly. Thankfully, one of the vendors on that project did for me. XD https://www.vadatech.com/media/pdf_SGSS-NASA-Paper-001.pdf
(I am honestly quite shocked that whitepaper is on their website, unclassified project or not.)
@zetasyanthis why is that?
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It goes into internal details on the project a bit more than I'm surprised their NDA allowed for. Then again, considering how terrible of a company they were to work with, I guess I could be more shocked? XD
@zetasyanthis oh i forgot one
- current probes that are powered 100% by the scope itself, no external power supply needed
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@Felthry
Oh, that's a nice change! :D