Tek Tak Toe

[modeller]

I agree with mstone.

It costs US $ 439,824

That's many more times the cost of my current house and property.

I've worked with microwave systems in a simulator setting, and it's incredibly difficult to get the equipment set up. Any small movement of anything will throw off the whole setup.

I even wonder how a signal can connect to the thing without anyone sneezing on the connector and disrupting the calibration.

[analoger]

...and uses tricks that would make most physicists say, "WTF?"

I'm wondering if it's outsourced to Mars

I'm getting now off topic but I'm more and more curious to learn about this Microwave world, any recommended reading?

Thanks.

[adafruit_support_mike]

Not really my field, so I can't point you to anything specific, but you'd need to get familiar with Maxwell's equations.

All the rules we use here in the low-speed world are trivial reductions of Maxwell. They aren't perfectly accurate, but the error is small.. sort of the way Newtonian mechanics breaks down when you get close to the speed of light, but is accurate to less than the diameter of an atom at "driving down the street" speeds.

When signals get really fast, the training wheels come off and you have to do everything the hard way. Even something as simple as a resistor gets complicated when the length of the resistor is a significant fraction of the physical distance between wavefronts in the signal.

[mikeselectricstuff]

This is the front-end used in that scope :

[modeller]

I'm wondering if it's outsourced to Mars

I'm getting now off topic but I'm more and more curious to learn about this Microwave world, any recommended reading?

Just Google microwave circuit board design ...

63 GHz is 6.3 * 10^10 Hz

Infrared light is around 10^12 Hz ... who knows, in a few years we'll have a scope that essentially measures light.

You're getting into such high frequencies that the way the circuit operates and some types of components are designed by their physical shape, the spacing between traces, the type of corners of the traces, the thickness, the distance to the ground plane, the angles of one trace compared to the adjacent one, the phase of the moon ... just kidding about the last one.

You can see some of that in Mike's picture. You can see places where you wonder "Why did they make the shape so odd?" It's because it's acting as a component of the overall design, or it's being made to stop some interaction with the other parts of the circuit.

I used to work on a search radar in the Air Force. I have on my desk a part of the waveguide (I use it as a pencil holder now). That piece of waveguide was in a 2.5 GHz system. See the cavity? That was attached to a lot of other pieces of rectangular waveguide. That's how the radar waves traveled to the antenna. For a 63 GHz system it would be a very small cavity. It's all about the shape.

Like I said, at these frequencies it's all about the physical shape of everything. Let's just say you ain't gonna be breadboarding a 63 GHz circuit. It's all probably designed in a computer that has a whole @*&!load of rules it follows regarding all these interactions, and then a circuit board is made and tested.

[analoger]

How does this:

http://www.tek.com/oscilloscope/tds1000

compare to:

http://www.tek.com/oscilloscope/tbs1000 ... cilloscope

The second is cheaper in price but the capabilities are the same???

[mikeselectricstuff]

The TBS series is just a superficial makeover of the old TDS - they hope that adding a colour screen to a creaky old architecture will fool people into thinking it's something new and not an obsolete architecture that compares poorly to scopes at half the price from their competition. A cheap Rigol dumps all over these at half the price.

The comment on this page says it all..
http://www.tek.com/blog/tbs1000-series- ... can-afford

[analoger]

Regardless of their relatively high prices, what is good about Tek is lifetime warranty, reliability and it's made in USA.

For a starting hobbyist like me with little knowledge and no experience, it's hard to decide. I wish they had a special discount for hobbysts, something around 75% off

[modeller]

Regardless of their relatively high prices, what is good about Tek is lifetime warranty, reliability and it's made in USA.

Made in USA? I don't think so. Zoom in on the attachment. Not many types of test equipment like that are made in the USA anymore.

And the warranty is 5 years - not lifetime.

[analoger]

Well it's assembled in China, but not the design and specifications.

I found another one:

Rohde & Schwarz

http://www.rohde-schwarz.com/en/product ... 10790.html

[modeller]

Well it's assembled in China, but not the design and specifications.

So ... it's not made in the USA then. That's why Microsoft starting printing "Designed in the USA" on the bottom of it's mice, because stating "Made in the USA" is misleading if it isn't assembled in the USA.

I found another one:

Rohde & Schwarz

http://www.rohde-schwarz.com/en/product ... 10790.html

Yep, you found another one alright. I can find other ones too. Lots of other scopes made by lots other manufacturers. That line of scopes is very expensive from what I could Google.

For a starting hobbyist like me with little knowledge and no experience, it's hard to decide.

I guess I don't understand what you really want. If you are just a starting hobbyist why are you posting up a line of scopes that would make a decent down payment on a house? Why don't you get a nice Rigol DS1052 @ $350

http://www.tequipment.net/RigolDS1052E.html

and use it for a couple of years until you know you want to stay in the hobby and until you know what you really want in a high-end scope

[analoger]

Why don't you get a nice Rigol DS1052 @ $350

Simply because it's Chinese. And unless it's made in USA, UK or Germany I don't bother even if I had to pay a lot.

[modeller]

Why don't you get a nice Rigol DS1052 @ $350

Simply because it's Chinese. And unless it's made in USA, UK or Germany I don't bother even if I had to pay a lot.

Well we already determined that Tektronics scopes aren't made in the USA - they are made in China ...

Made in the UK? Good luck with that. Not sure about Germany but ... you're getting into the electronics hobby, and as far as oscilloscopes go, you refuse to buy any that are made in China. OK.

I'm very curious analoger, are you expecting to apply this Chinese purchasing filter to any other electronics hobby products such as resistors, ICs, displays, DMMs, function generators, capacitors, transistors, diodes, LEDs, speakers, servos, relays, ... shall I go on?

I'm just curious as to what it is about scopes that cause you to say that you won't purchase one made in China, when just about everything else you'll be buying will be either made in China or, if it is really made (as in assembled) in a country other than China, will be chock absolutely full of Chinese components and parts.

I mean I really wish the world were different, I wish the US made oscilloscopes and all the parts that go inside them, and that the price and functionality of one would be competitive with a Chinese scope.

But that world doesn't exist anymore.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Agilent manufacture in Malaysia if that helps..
I think the really high end stuff is made in USA, but if you want a cheap US/UK made scope you'll be looking at something analogue and 20-30 years old.

[modeller]

I did a little research analoger. If you want a scope made in Germany, then R&S is for you -

Rohde & Schwarz

Central R&D is located at company headquarters in Munich. Most products are manufactured in the Rohde & Schwarz plants in Memmingen, Teisnach and Vimperk (Czech Republic). In 2005, Rohde & Schwarz acquired HAMEG GmbH, a German T&M equipment manufacturer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohde_%26_Schwarz

Regarding their scopes, as far as I can tell, the low end scope is a RTM1052 -

Digital Oscilloscope 2 x 500 MHz

500 MHz bandwidth
2 analog channels
2.5 GSa/s sample rate, 5 GS/s interleaved
4MS memory depth, 8MS interleaved

When I searched for the price from different vendors, I kept getting this sort of statement -

"Contact us for a quote"

Here, let me translate what that means for you, it means

"Prepare to pay out the wazoo for this piece of gear"

or

"We're too afraid to actually post the price because you will leave our store in a nanosecond, so please contact us so that we might get a salesman to try and hook you"

I couldn't find any prices listed in dollars, so I just found one listed in euros here -

https://webstore.rohde-schwarz.com/hk/r ... -7042.html

The list price for the low end scope is 6,695 euro, so I ran it through a currency converter.

6,695.00 EUR = 8,551.74 USD

So that's $8552.

But hey, if you can afford $8k for a scope, then by all means buy it, I'll be jealous.