Which scope?

Which product is right for your exact requirements
Post Reply
Guest

Which scope?

Post by Guest »

Good Morning.

I am considering purchasing some of the PICOscopes to update our lab. At present we are pretty short of scopes and I must consider these PC based scopes.

To save time I would appreciate some information and guidelines on your range. The current scope that we all fight over is excellent for our needs (Lecroy 9345AM 2Gs/s 500Mhz). We use this mailnly for digital signal capture (20Mhz), low noise amplifier and filter characterisation and capture, instrumentation measurements and triggering on complex and high speed arbitrary waveforms, sometimes very low amplitudes (no less than 20mV). The Lecroy does not have the FFT feature, but we have written one for it via a pc. How close is the new 300 series to the Lecroy or similar scopes.
Secondly For general instrumentation and digital capture upto 20Mhz, what will be the best option for us. Please bear in mind that the function of the swept frequency/peak hold function is very useful to us.

My second question is that RS only stock the ADC-212/100 can they get the 3000 series? (it makes it easier for purchasing via RS)

Thanks

Jon

Guest

Post by Guest »

Sorry to be a pain...
Also, how do the picoscope compare to the likes of the Iso-tech IDS810 's. These are retailing at £799 in RS and seem to offer pretty much the same as the 3000 series.

Thanks

Jon

Sarah

Post by Sarah »

Hi Jon

Thank you for your post and your interest in our products.

For measuring a signal of 20MHz I would recommend using our new PS3000 series. You could choose either the PS3205 which has a 50MHz bandwidth, or the PS3206 which has a 100MHz bandwidth. Unfortunately we cannot at present offer anything with a 500MHz bandwidth.

The PS3000 oscilloscopes have input voltage ranges from ±10mV to ±20V so could easily measure your low voltage inputs. The features such as FFT are all included in the software, along with the facility to obtain a number of different real-time measurement calculations.

The FFT has the option to show peak values so that it holds the maximums reached at each frequency. I assume this is what you mean by "swept frequency/peak hold". If not then do provide us with more information so that we can further advise you.

I have looked at the Iso-Tech scope that RS stock, and it does offer a bandwidth of 150MHz, which is higher than our PS3206. In many ways it is a similar scope, I would say that the main difference is the memory feature. The Iso-Tech scope has 125k memory and the PS3206 has 1MB of on board memory. All saved waveforms are saved directly to the computer memory.

RS are able to sell the PS3000 series of oscilloscopes as well as the ADC-212 range.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards,

Post Reply