by Doug Coulter » Mon Mar 07, 2011 1:36 pm
The built in analyzer was pretty cool. One of our consulting customers bought one for a hardware engineer there we really liked (both). He could make that thing do some amazing tricks, but...learning curve very steep, a lot more than the old type logic analyzer I was used to (and still own someplace). It especially excelled in doing things with serial type streams. But the darn thing cost like half a year's pay too. I paid about 1k for the 2.5 ghz 4 ch GW Instek (which has some of that stuff) and under 400 for a 100mhz 2 ch one, both of which are plenty nice enough for my uses here.
Nothing will ever beat the old tektronix trigger circuits though -- sadly, that includes their own new products.
And, there's linux tools for Insteks that integrate screen shots, raw data, settings (both ways), and inputs to things like GnuPlot and Octave if you want that -- all free. Some is a little clunky, but it all works well enough to get a job done (typical of the linux tool box approach, it's pretty solid). Of course, I can't stream 4 channels of 2.5ghz sample rate over USB to the PC (which couldn't eat that even if I could) but it can take plenty of snapshots quick. Scope does things like FFT's and go-nogo waveform tests, which is enough for me as I'm not trying to design a new ethernet MAC or PHY chip or anything like that, just fix things, test sensors, and look at stuff going on in the fusor mostly.
Used to be you needed all that junk just to get an 8080 going at all. Now, you just get a PIC -- add 5v and code, and it all works, no picky clock waveform duty cycle issues and all that crap.
Or you get an eval board and use it to do the project, realizing that while you overpay for that -- it saves you so much time that if your time is worth diddly, you make out doing that anyway.
But if all I'm doing is for example, looking at some unwanted feedback in my new 3He preamp that creates some bobble on the signal, heck, any scope does fine. The digitals have one big advantage of holding the last trigger on screen till the next one happens, which is good when my puny homebrew neutron source only counts the tube about once every 3-4 seconds, don't always want to do this kind of work next to a running fusor, after all.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.