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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Oh, that's a nice change! :D
@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*
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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@zetasyanthis i don't know how much they cost but i would assume millions
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@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.
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.)
@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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(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
Example: "Oh, we only tested our Ethernet switches with PRBS loopbacks" was on of theirs that I got them to admit on the phone with the end customer... after we started seeing 90% of packets drop on the wire for certain transit patterns. :P
When I moved from AZ to CA a few years back (though I'm now back in AZ), I damned near pulled a Martin Luther and nailed 95 things they did wrong to their door on the way through Nevada. XD
@zetasyanthis we don't know what that means!
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Oop, sorry, could have been clearer. They, just, uh, never connected their switches to an external device during any of their design and testing phases to see if they bloody well worked. O.o;
@zetasyanthis oh that sounds like a good way to test things, sure
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Right? The best part was their CEO admitting this on the phone, not knowing what he'd done wrong in front of my management, the contractor above me, and NASA auditors above them. XD
I don't think they get much business from those folks anymore... :P
@zetasyanthis I get the feeling the CEO thought that sounded really impressive while anyone who knew what it means just thought "oh dear...."
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Yeah, and to boot, the man was a total ass. He really abused folks under him, I found out later. One of those screaming and raging types. D:
@Felthry
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