Holy Oscilloscope Batman! Review of Tektronix MSO2024B Oscilloscope

Here's something cool. That one of the Reviewers on Element14.com did with his Tektronix MSO2024B Oscilloscope. Check out his Review and he uploaded his Code to Put a Batman Signal on your, Tektronix MSO2024B Oscilloscope. Check the comments for the Code and How to Video...

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Tektronix MSO2024B Oscilloscope

Review of Tektronix MSO2024B Oscilloscope

Scoring

Product Performed to Expectations:	10
Specifications were sufficient to design with:	10
Demo Software was of good quality:	10
Demo was easy to use:	10
Support materials were available:	10
The price to performance ratio was good:	9

TotalScore:	59

Linas Karpavicius
RoadTester since Jun 21, 2012
Evaluation Type: Independent Products
Did the box contain everything required to use the product?: Yes
Comparable Products/Other parts you considered: Agilent/Rigol/Lecroy
What were the biggest problems encountered?: RS232 Decode does not work, i still don't know is it because of my setup, or oscilloscope itself. RS232 is not only edge, but time related, so it much harder to decode and setup properly.
Detailed Review:

Today I received an MSO2024B oscilloscope from element14.com to review it

Many thanks to element14 community for the Roadtest Program



MSO2024B Characteristics



          MSO2024B is the best from MSO2000 series. It has 4 analog channels with 200 MHz analog bandwidth (2.1 ns of response time for input step signal). Each of the channel is coupled with 1 GSps ADC (ADC is not shared between two channels, hence there is no drop in sampling speed even if all four channels are activated). Moreover, this oscilloscope is from Mixed Signal Oscilloscope series (MSO), so it has additional 16 channels for digital inputs, which are capable of ±40V input with TTL, CMOS, ECL, PECL predefined trigger thresholds. A user can also define its custom trigger threshold if needed ( separate threshholds can be set only for 0-7b and 8-15b ). This oscilloscope has 8b ADC resolution as any other conventional oscilloscoope, 2 mV/div to 5 V/div input range that could be scaled to ADC via the analog front end. Such being the case one can use all of ADC‘s resolution to capture waveform, that includes ±1V offset for 2 mV/div to 200 mV/div and ±25V offset for 200 mV/div to 5 V/div for ADC front-end scaling. That means if one has a DC input coupling, and the signal of interest is 6 mV of amplitude on top of 1V DC offset, then the ADC maximum bit value will be saturated, and the oscilloscope will only display a line. The workaround could be an AC coupling, but in case of a low frequency signal this is not always an option. The MSO2024B can record up to 1 mln. points of data while running at 1 ms/div – up to 2ns/div of time scale, and 1.25 mln. points running at 100s/div – up to 1ms/div time scale. The default buffer is 100k points (or 125k in case of a slower time base). Such capability is a huge improvement compared to my old TPS2024 oscilloscope, that only has 2.5k data points of memory. With this oscilloscope it is now possible to use slow time scale to record a signal, and then zoom in up to 2 ns/div range and still be able to see the waveform as it is. Like the Agilent 2000x and 3000x series, it has a soft power button, hence at any given time it uses 6.6 W of power. By pressing the „Power On“ button the average power usage escalates up to 30W. This feature is not very appealing, because it will cost around 4$ annually just for standby. My guess that this figure would go two times lower* for USA, because of two times lower outlet voltage. This is not a big deal, but still, why not to use a good old fashion hard switch?