Hacker News Reader

Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

Cool graphs.

> Our previous reticence to measure UPSs was centered around the connection of our very nice $50,000 Rohde & Schwarz MXO58 oscilloscope directly to mains power. [...] What we do have is a Chroma 61507, a programmable AC power source, capable of generating its own isolated Alternating Current(AC) signal. The AC signal created by the Chroma 61507 is galvanically isolated from the "earth"/ground, providing a floating source.

This too seems to be a pretty expensive piece of gear (the price I found with a quick Google was >$28,000) so I think it's worth mentioning that the same job could be done with an isolation transformer, which costs maybe a couple hundred bucks.

View on HN

Agreed.

For such low frequency stuff, it feels way safer to just buy a cheap <$500 scope for this kind of work. Using a $50k scope when it's not needed just seems needlessly risky.

Also, float the DUT, not the scope... Sometimes that's not possible, and the temptation is there, but it's really not worth it. Just buy the right gear like a diff probe. You can get one for a few hundred bucks if you don't mind going downmarket.

You can also use two probes and do CH2 - CH1. (Disconnect the GND clips!)

> For such low frequency stuff, it feels way safer to just buy a cheap <$500 scope for this kind of work. Using a $50k scope when it's not needed just seems needlessly risky.

They should have spent $300 on a differential probe.

The higher end scopes can have some nice power analysis packages.

> the same job could be done with an isolation transformer

It really cannot -- the isolation transformer doesn't have control of its output, so it can't start or stop cleanly, and it can't ramp voltage cleanly. (An autotransformer kind of can, but it's still not really good enough.) The AC source can stop on a dime, with no inductance of its own, so it is the correct way to do this test.

Source: I have had to do this and refused to use the autotransformer anymore because it was just too much of a pain in the butt. (We rented the AC source.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com