Thursday, March 3, 2016

Terrific Customer Testimonial for Siglent's SDS1102X

We recently asked a remote engineer to track down a power supply bleed issue. One circuit was bleeding into a power supply and affecting another circuit.
He had the SDS1102X scope and without thinking he hooked it up, saw the ripple, fixed the problem and sent us scope shots clearly showing the problem. He had to have the scope on 2mV a division with x1 probes to see the issue.  I thought nothing of it as I see the SDS1102X as a low cost scope. Add to this that digital scopes have trouble seeing this kind of low level analog noise so I assumed it was a very obvious problem.

I then asked my technician to reproduce this engineer's results. Since this kind of work is usually easier with an analog scope he chose that tool. He had a decent Tektronix 2246 scope but was not able to see the noise on the power line buried in all the scope's noise.  I then got out the heavy artillery, a Tektronix 2465B, but was also not able to see it either. I could see something but not clearly enough to tell for sure what I was seeing.   From there I got a very expensive 5 figure Agilent Scope but it was even worse than the Tektronix scope and of no help at all. Finally using a very high end external Tektronix pre-amp and filter combo I was able to see what the original Engineer saw using only the SDS1102X.

I read that the SDS1102X was supposed to have a very low noise, quality front end pre-amp and was impressed that it went smaller than the 2mV/Div of most scopes but due to the cost figured it wasn't that fantastic and certainly not better than my "industry benchmark" 2465B.  Clearly the pre-amp and front end were way lower noise than many top of the line high end scopes with huge reputations for being the best.  This was simply amazing that this scope was able to help us fix a problem that several scopes costing many times more were not able.

We had a similar experience looking for very fast and short glitch that was on a slow moving wave shape.  All our analog scopes, except the very cheap ones, could see it clearly but non of our digital scopes could see it. We had many types of digital scopes from older nice, newer decent, to very expensive high end mega G/S scopes.   The SDS1102X was able to detect and display it very clearly, perhaps the clearest of all the scopes. I have never seen a digital scope at any price range that could see that kind of information without aliasing.

Keep up the good work.

R Shaich

{Company Name removed by request}


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