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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

This scope seems to be out of reach of hobbyists.

I mean, yes. Keysight's test equipment skews towards the high end in general, and this is their absolute top-of-the-line oscilloscope -- it is quite likely the highest performance oscilloscope available on the market. It costs around $1.3M before you start configuring options.

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.

Rohde & Schwarz has the ZVA, but that's a two port unit while Keysight has 4. I haven't seen anyone else come close.

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.

The ZVA is an vector network analyzer, not an oscilloscope. Don't get me wrong, the ZVA is still an extremely impressive piece of engineering, but not even close to what Keysight had achieved with the UXR.

Derp! I got this confused with the PNA-X, which is a four port VNA that does 110GHz with additional heads. Thanks for the correction.

Remember, caffeine first, then internet.

The ZVA is not the same use case as this. The competitor to URX is the teledyne lecroy lab master which also has 110 GHz bandwidth. The difference is that teledyne uses bandwidth interleaving, which keysight argues is inferior (they are probably correct, keysight has some ENOB advantages, however teledyne has other advantages). Tektronix has essentially left the competition for this super high end, they didn't manage to go beyond 70 GHz (which was some years back for all of these)

> Even in a commercial environment, hardware like this would be unusual, and very few people would have access to it.

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.

Their entry level scopes start around $500 and comes standard with protocol decoding for i2c and serial.

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.

https://www.saleae.com/

I wouldn't buy a "real" Saleae though. Insanely overpriced these days. You can buy clones for literally a 50th of the price.

Overpriced relative to the COGS of the hardware, and yet a bargain compared to what you get from any other test equipment company for the same money. The magic is in the software, and I’d much rather pay for that excellent software via expensive hardware than go back to a pre-Saleae world.

I guess. I haven't used their software but I watched a brief video and I don't know if I'd want to pay £400 for it if it was my own money. PulseView seems comparable in capability.

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.

I’ve bought several real ones over the years. They are great it isn’t worth wasting time with shitty debugging tools. They cost more than they used too sure but they are also massively useful and a great bargain for the features you get.

I have clones and I have the real one.

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.

The probes for this scope are out of the reach of hobbyists!

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!).

Tell me about it. I'm just a hobbyist myself, but for $REASONS I splurged on a moderately high-end (albeit used) Keysight logic analyzer a while back. And the probes for that dang thing are approximately more expensive (new) than the analyzer itself was. I still only have half a set for that reason. So yeah, probes for high-end gear are a unique and expensive beast all apart from the rest. :-(

Yeah, even with differential 100x probes, how do you get a controlled measurement from the test unit (antenna/amp) to the 110GHz instrument? I've used 25GHz spectrum analyzers and probes... and they're nuts!

If you're in the US and near a major metro, keep an eye on bidspotter. Every once in a while you can catch a lot of high end test gear and/or accessories at lower prices than ebay.

I generally agree, but I disagree with calling 1 mm IR. That's sort of arguing that the whole THz range is IR which I think is silly (I note that you did not make this up, but it is somewhat commonly used)

I kinda agree 1THz is considered Far IR at 100um, which is a LOT of bandwidth! From working with folks who did Tunnel Junction mixers, I think it's because things start looking particle-like, beyond wave-like at those frequencies.

I guess it's actually called EHF up to 300GHz.

yes and there's these for some models https://github.com/OpenHantek/openhantek

If you wait by the eBay river long enough, it too will come floating by.

I'm still waiting for the day some weird niche, Rohde & Schwarz equipment I saw once and thought "that'd be cool to have" pops up on ebay.

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.

Old HP / Agilent / Keysight (aka HPAK) stuff does show up on Ebay for decent prices from time to time, so long as you don't need the specs of the latest and newest gear. And hobbyists usually don't. Personally all of the "purchased new" test equipment in my home lab is Rigol, and almost all of the "purchased used" is HPAK. It makes a nice balance.

Now to score one of those HP 3458A's one of these days...

While that is true, equivalent time sampling oscilloscopes with high bandwidth optical heads from the 90-00s still sell for 5 figures on ebay, so arguably still out of typical hobbyist ranges.

This is unlikely because most new-ish equipment will be traded in or is leased outright, and will go to the crusher instead of being sold on the used market. Manufacturers obviously don't want a large used market.

Sorry for the horrible link, but this one seems to be an older generation of a similar device.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/255302112122?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DI...

Huh, 20-up-to-80GHz for $165. Oookayyyy. Riight then.

(NB, the only critical bit an eBay link is the item ID, ie (/itm/[0-9]+).)

165K!

Facepalm D:. I don't know how I managed to leave that off. Still not used to the extra fiddliness of typing on a phone keyboard :(

No problem :) Anyway, the point was that you can find the weirdest stuff on ebay, even ridiculously high end stuff from a couple of years ago. And of course $165K is still a fairly large chunk of cash for a second hand scope (to put it mildly) but it's about 10% of what it originally sold for.

Thanks. A random question this makes me think of: I've had "get an oscilloscope" on the one-day queue for quite a while, and I might be looking at actually being able to get one at last. For someone trying to balance a) understanding how not to blow it up, b) understanding how not to blow up what I'm poking at, and c) wrangling the newfound ability to MeAsUrE eVeRyThInG ("forget sleep, what does *that* trace do????")... I'm ultimately going to prefer (the confidence boost of) starting with a scope cheap enough to blow up instead of nuking my {computer, phone, AC outlet, USB charger, ebike charge circuit, FPGA devkit, ...} - but at the same time I'll definitely want to play with LVDS, MIPI, low-rate serdes stuff too, etc. All while I have exactly zero formal understanding of the basics >:D (hence the "blow up the scope first" bit...).

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)

Not sure if you just made a typo there, but that's 20GHz, up to 80GSa/s (GigaSamples per second).

Thanks. TIL I really shouldn't be commenting on things I don't properly understand and not reading listing titles properly... right.

Stays extra far away from heavy machinery for today

They’ve been giving their devices away to every electronics YouTuber, you really see them everywhere plus the sponsored ads. I’m not really sure how many hobbyists really need a scope like what they make, though.

Erm, I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but they certainly are not giving these away to youtubers. This is a >$1 million instrument that isn't even very useful for hobbyist electronics. The ones they give away are from their new EDU line that does around 100 MHz sampling.

I just meant they are giving their devices away to lots of streamers. It’s hard to find any electronics channel not sponsored by them, or where the host doesn’t have and is giving more devices away to viewers.

They didn't say this device (although they are around) but their devices, meaning from low to high-end.

Keysight make gear that spans a pretty broad range of applications and price points. They don't necessarily outright target hobbyists the way Rigol or Siglent or some other brands do, but they have pointedly introduced some new lower-end hobbyist/student focused kit over the last couple of years. But their bread and butter still seems to be stuff that's sold in volumes of like 2 or 3 a year, for millions of $$$ and probably goes to places like Los Alamos or JPL or something...

Their bread and butter is the midrange, same as it has always been. That's the area centered around $10k (at least for scopes; meters are lower and spec ans are higher), and is where the price-volume product is best.

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.

I suspect they still sell as many of these they can reasonably make, which I suspect will be significantly more than 2 or 3. I personally know of at least 5 labs who bought at least one of these in the last 2 or 3 years (I believe the URX platform is like 3 or 4 years old, but maybe wasn't at 110 GHz at the beginning)

OK, yeah, saying "2 or 3" wasn't meant to be completely literal. The point was just to say that they cover a broad range of market segments. I'm not so concerned about the exact details, especially regarding the really high-end, exotic stuff that I'll probably never touch.

If you need this equipment, you're not a hobbyist.

Well, I don't need one.

That's because its not a hobbyist scope.

Most probably, you need some sort of government approval to buy it.

No you don't. Source: I bought previous generation top of the line scopes as well as similar lecroy ones and have colleagues who just bought this device.

Thanks for correcting me, but what about selling to "non-western" countries?

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