New Agilent scopes

luke

I've had an MSO6000 since it came out - looks like they are basically pushing the features from this range downmarket. Don't know why they have chaged from VXWorks to WinCE - maybe the VXWorks license cost was too high. At least WinCE may make it easier for someone to hack the license crippleware!

Why 70MHz version ? So Agilent can advertise a low entry cost product that nobody will actually buy.
Similarly LAN and VGA as options , although I think this was as much about providing a GPIB option as anything else as they;d be stupid to include GPIB as standard. However they have a USB host port on the back so they could have provided GPIB via an adapter into that.

Segmented memory "on a $1000 scope" = 'fraid not -  this is an option. Ditto mask test.

Why no ground coupling? - there is a ground level mark on the side of the screen so you don't really need it.

Are you sure there isn't a hardware counter - the 5/6000 has it but it is a seperate measurement labelled 'counter'. You can even feed in an external ref freq for mode accuracy.

I hope they've made the upgrade process more streamlined. Here's what happenned when I upgraded the memory on mine :
Make enquiry on website. Get email asking to phone UK sales rep. Takes 2 days to finally get in touch. Had to fax order to them. A week later received Fedexed piece of paper from USA containing a number that then needs entering into their website to get the licence key. What a joke. AFAIK they;ve now moved all their UK sales to independent distributors - had to get a quote via them recently when I wanted to know how much serial decode costed (too much!), so I'd be very surprised if it's as simple as it should be, i.e. immediate online purchase.

luke

until today Hantek/Tekway DSO was my favorite low end DSO.

As a Hantek/Tekway friend i would say - for sure the 2500wfrms/s are not comparable
to 50k on Agilent, but still better as on all others low end DSOs on the market.
Of course they a 3 times cheaper (and hackable) and the core functionality is very comparable
too (except function Generator and teaching stuff), but for someone having at least 1k USD budget
the new Agilent is definitely the best choice from all DSOs up to 5k USD.

The modules are bit expensive (i did found pricing on a german distibutor page, but not for bw expand), but that's typical for Agilent anyway.
Even the full 200MHz model with all modules enabled is still cheap (if you compare what it can to what you will get from others),
so yeah, i love it too!

Rigol's new CA series costs almost the same, but if you look on the wfrms/s yuo will definitely chose Agilent,
probably Rigol ppl are a bit pissed off now - the former "partner" Agilent fooled them.