Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Elektor Reviews the Siglent SDG830 Signal Generator



If you need a signal generator fairly often in your home lab, the attractively priced SDG830 is a very good choice. For your money you get an excellent instrument with many options that delivers good waveforms and is packaged in a sturdy case.

The generated waveforms look nice, and the sine wave looks very clean on the scope screen. This was confirmed by measurements with our Audio Precision analyzer: over the entire audio range (and even above it) the harmonic distortion was under 0.025%, which is an excellent figure when you consider that the DAC in the instrument is a 14-bit type. At the upper end of the frequency range (30 MHz) the sine waveform still looks clean with no visible jaggies, which is a sign of a properly dimensioned output filter.

Siglent supplies the PC software EasyWave with its signal generators, which you can use to compose your own waveforms. The program looks a bit outdated on the graphical front, but it does what it is supposed to do and has quite a few options. You can use mathematical functions to create a waveform, and you can adjust an existing waveform by simply overwriting sections with the mouse cursor on the screen. The signal generator can be connected to the PC through a USB cable, but you can also put a CSV file on a USB stick and plug it into the USB port on the front panel.

Sounds like they like it!

Get yours here for only $332!  http://www.saelig.com/product/sdg830.htm



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