Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

Yeah 1 GHz is nice, but that tiny 200 MHz Siglent is going to be much more useful in practice for most things.

Speaking of boat anchors, I'm trying to get my company to buy a DSA91304a (13 GHz scope with SERDES debugging). ~$44K with all the options, but still Windows-XP. The Windows-7 ones unfortunately don't have the options I want. Maybe there is a hack..

View on HN

As I wrote: the TDS7104 is now sitting on a shelf in the garage, next to an Agilent 54831 and some other boat anchors. My daily drivers are a Siglent scope and a puny TDS220, which is about to be replaced by a TDS3052 that I'm bringing back to life. Hobbyists rarely need more than 100 MHz BW.

I hope you're able to thoroughly test that DSA91304a before dropping $44k on it!

TDS220

Cute little thing. The reality is you hope that's all you need.

I hope you're aware of the TekWiki:

https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Main_Page

Mine is a TDS224. Cheap, but I only use it for keeping my Eurorack synth going. 100MHz is overkill for audio. Although some modules use STM32 microcontrollers, so maybe the speed will come in handy.

TekWiki is great!

100MHz is overkill for most hobbyists use cases, and definitely repairing test equipment: it's always the power supply.

200 MHz is good enough for most things. And for modern computing electronics even 1GHz is too slow, e.g. monitoring USB3 or high speed PCIE data lanes.

Did you get a price quote for that keysight oscilloscope? I see that you can also rent them for $2000 a month.

We've rented them in the past- always we're not quite sure we're done so keep them much longer than necessary. They're kind of a pain to pack and ship.

I have a 1.5GHz TDS7154B in addition to my 200MHz SDS1204 specifically to measure power rail noise with a low noise probe.

You just can’t characterise power rail noise well with less than 500MHz of bandwidth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com