Data communication rates have soared in recent years and there is every reason to believe that this trend will accelerate. Information speeds that were less than 1 Gb/sec have surpassed 10 Gb/sec. Optical communication is greater than 100 Gb/sec, with 1 Tb/sec down the road. RF wireless communications is in the mid-gigahertz range, and RF […]
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Mask and limit testing on oscilloscopes
Mask testing is used in production facilities for screening and quality control of components and electronic equipment and also for debugging and troubleshooting. It is quick and efficient and lets users identify harmful anomalous behavior that arises in one or a billion waveforms. It involves setting limits of acceptability on signals at the outputs of […]
Inside Teledyne LeCroy’s oscilloscope workshops
Teledyne LeCroy is conducting one-day workshops on beginner and intermediate scope practices. We sat through the events that were held in the Cleveland, Ohio area. Here’s what we saw. The Teledyne LeCroy scope workshops are held around the country, usually where LeCroy has a local office. Where we attended, things got going around 10 am […]
Basics of active and differential scope probes
By far the most used oscilloscope probes are the passive 10:1 attenuation probe. It is appropriate when the frequency of the signal under investigation is less than 600 MHz. Impedance matching from the probe tip to channel input port is critical. A mismatch gives rise to reflections, collisions and loss of data. At dc to […]
LXI or LAN extensions basics for instrumentation and SCPI
Keysight Technologies conceived of LAN Extensions for Instrumentation (LXI) in 2005 as a way to enable test and measurement interfaces using web servers in conjunction with Ethernet. LXI is used extensively in connecting computers and electronic test equipment, particularly oscilloscopes. Local Area Network (LAN)-enabled instruments can connect to a computer, using as a medium the […]
Working with the PicoScope PC-based oscilloscope
A PC-based oscilloscope, or USB oscilloscope as it is also known, has a lot going for it. For one thing, it costs substantially less than a bench model with equivalent specifications, given that most users already own the major component. The PC or Mac provides the processing and display parts of the equation. (The computer, […]
Working with waveforms in mixed-domain oscilloscopes
Waveform generators generally contain a library of common waveforms, which can be individually accessed and displayed by running a BNC cable to an active analog channel input in an oscilloscope. Most oscilloscopes have, available as an option, an internal arbitrary function generator (AFG), which permits the user to create an endless variety of waveforms and […]
Digital phosphor oscilloscopes, persistence, and eye patterns
The digital phosphor oscilloscope takes its name from the old analog phosphor scope, but the resemblance is superficial. It was difficult to see the trace on the CRT screen in an analog scope because the electron beam dissipated instantly. To solve this problem, early engineers came up with the idea of coating the inner surface […]
The basics of simulating radar signals with AWGs
Radar is quite simple in concept, but it becomes highly complex in actual implementation. Many decades passed between the time it was first envisioned and when useful working models emerged, which happened just in time to save England from total defeat in the 1940s. When it comes to testing radar, the situation has become easier […]
A test setup that simulates automotive radar
Jungik Suh from Keysight recently took us through a simulation of an automotive radar system, a hot topic these days thanks to work being done in autonomous vehicles. The point of simulating a radar signal is to provide a test signal for downstream electronics that will act on what shows up in the radar return. […]