Keysight UXR 110GHz Oscilloscope Teardown [video] (2018)
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He has this wealth of incredibly specialized high end knowledge, but much of the equipment he tears down is just the absolute bleeding edge (or former bleeding edge) of stuff you can find in a normal lab. It's so cool to see what you have to change to squeeze three orders of magnitude more performance out compared to the $300 siglent on my bench.
Not that I'm ever really going to fix a 20,000 piece of test gear by identifying a shorted resistor working backwards from the block diagram, but I feel like I'm at least learning a ton watching him do it =).
It's funny to compare him to BigClive, who comes across as very working-class and mostly tears down the cheapest AliExpress junk, but their actual approach and content is very similar in many ways.
Hey hey hey now, BigClive does lots of stuff that's not from AliExpress/eBay like giant HV transformers, traffic signals, pedestrial detectors[1], etc. But yeah, all of that kind of matches his blue collar persona while both being equally technical.
- Another Scotsman
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/keysight-officially-l...
Super Quadrodyne?
A decent understanding of SDR receivers is all you need to understand how this works. Same basic ideas, just one or two orders of magnitude faster. Incredible RF engineering; An Indium Phosphide (InP) stage feeds a Silicon-Germanium (SiGe) stage feeds about 9kg of custom CMOS DSP + high speed memory. A bargain at less than $1.5 million.
Whoah whoah whoah what... Okay, I have no doubt it costs a ton to make this but can someone tell me how they got the contracts in order to actually produce this? Who needed this and who committed to pay upfront before it was fully developed?
[But omg these insufferable oscilloscope UIs. Please stop with this shit and just simplify it. We don't need fake bevels and ugly gradients.]
Imagine you have a hardware group of around 150 people led by a director, like 10-15 middle managers, some PMs, etc. Total comp for employees ranges from like 80k/yr for the team in a low CoL country to over 500k/yr for the director and tech leads. With support, offices, labs, sw, the group might cost like $150mm/yr. A few speed scopes just get budgeted in.
> The 110GHz 4-channel variant of the UXR-Series oscilloscope has an MSRP of $1.3 Million US dollars.
The low-end crap is not particularly profitable, but best not to cede to your rivals as long as you can at least break even.
The high-end stuff makes great marketing and probably sells better than 3 per year... though that might just be 4. JPL and Los Alamos don't really need this stuff, though they probably have something somewhere. It's really designed for high-bit-rate stuff. I seem to recall DDR5 lowest-level debug being a major use case for the UXR in the early promo materials. I'd imagine it's also pretty good for some LTE stuff. And phased-array radars, because it seems like that's always what the highest-end stuff is for, no matter what it is.
Unfortunately their stuff in ebay is still pretty expensive secondhand, unless it's something hardly anyone except hardcore hobbyists would want, like television demodulators.
I do have some old Keysight stuff (well, most of it is HP and Agilent which ofc birthed Keysight) most of it was still several hundred dollars a price, mostly mid-80s-90s telecom equipment.
Now to score one of those HP 3458A's one of these days...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/255302112122?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DI...
(NB, the only critical bit an eBay link is the item ID, ie (/itm/[0-9]+).)
I guess I wonder if there's a reconcilable Venn diagram of viability somewhere in there, and if there is, what it might look like. (I think I'm looking at the oscilloscope as a C compiler, and electronics as Spicy Assembly xD)
Stays extra far away from heavy machinery for today
This isn't a general-purpose instrument. It's intended for engineers debugging systems which use extremely high-speed signalling. Even in a commercial environment, hardware like this would be unusual, and very few people would have access to it.
As for hobbyists... I'd love to hear of a hobby project that could make use of this.
Edit: Yeah, I'm thinking of the Keysight PNA-X which is a four port VNA. Still haven't seen anything come close to either offering, though.
Remember, caffeine first, then internet.
For most companies it's kind difficult to justify the investment, if they need equipment this accurate at this frequency they will just rent it from a third party Test Lab during hardware verification stages.
Get a 100MHz 4 Channel Hantek for $400 and it will do almost everything you can wrap your head around. Wires start looking like waveguides at 1GHz, much less 110GHz (That's almost infrared!).
I guess it's actually called EHF up to 300GHz.
https://www.keysight.com/us/en/products/oscilloscopes/infini...
Perhaps my favorite debugging tool though is the Saleae Logic. It's a does digital logic and analog in one and has a lot of protocol support.
I does still feel overpriced if you ask me. You can get a full Bluetooth Analyser with actually advanced software (I mean there's a huge difference between writing a protocol analyser for SPI or I2C or typical things that run on them, and Bluetooth) for like £1k.
But I guess it one of those things that is aimed at people who aren't using their own money so they make the most money by charging enterprise prices.
The clones are a copy of the Saleae units from 10 years ago. They’re not at all comparable to the current high-end ones.
One of the killer features of the current ones is the ability to also record an analog trace. It’s fantastic when you need to record minutes of something that misbehaves electrically every once in a while.