Midrange oscilloscopes focus on speed and resolution

The MXO 3 oscilloscope from Rohde & Schwarz brings fast viewing, quick data processing, and high resolution to your bench. It inherits features from higher-end models.

If you design, test, or troubleshoot circuits, you surely need an oscilloscope, and two eight-bit channels are not enough anymore. Indeed, the MXO 3 oscilloscope comes in four-or-eight channels with 12-bit vertical resolution, letting you see more of your analog or digital circuits on the display. In HD mode, the oscilloscope has up to 18 bits of vertical resolution.

The MXO 3 replaces the RTM 3000 series and brings features from MXO 4 and MXO 5 series to a lower-grade maximum bandwidth. It’s available at bandwidths that cover the low-to-midrange — 100 MHz, 250 MHz, 350 MHz, 500 MHz, and 1 GHz — making it suitable for analog circuits such as audio amplifiers and filters or for embedded/IoT circuits. The bandwidth is field upgradable. Standard acquisition memory is 125 Msamples standard, 500 Msamples optional. The MXO 3 is a lower-cost version of the MXO 5 (also 4 or 8 channels), which tops out at 2 GHz bandwidth and 1 Gsamples of data memory. Compare the MXO 3 to the MXO 4 and MXO 5 here.

Rohde & Schwarz included features that can save you time and help you catch signal anomalies that the company says other oscilloscopes might miss. For example, it features a screen update rate of 4.5 million updates/sec, which matches that of the MXO 4 and MXO 5, and which Rohde & Schwarz claims is the fastest in the industry. That speed means you can see up to 99% of all signal events.

Then there’s triggering. After all, if you can’t trigger your oscilloscope on a specific event, you’ll likely not see it at all. To that end, the MXO 3 uses hardware-accelerated triggering found in a custom ASIC that can rearm in 21 ns. As you’d expect, the MXO 3 uses common triggers such as level, pulse width, and runt, but it also lets you trigger on math such as power (voltage × current) calculations.

Because so many engineers use oscilloscopes to look at signals in the frequency domain, the MXO 3 lets you trigger on occurrences that are easily visible there but hard to see in the time domain. That can help you identify problems such as EMI issues. Besides setting a level trigger, you can use a zone trigger to capture an acquisition should a frequency spike occur in a particular range. You can also initiate a trigger should an event not occur at a specified time or at a specified frequency.

With its small footprint and and 11.6 inch (30 cm) display, the MXO 3 takes up little bench space yet still provides plenty of viewing area. If you have no available bench space whatsoever, you can mount the instrument using its VESA mounting holes.

Options include:

• 50 MHz single-channel arbitrary waveform generator
• A wide array of probes, including current probes, differential probes, and EMI probes
• 500 Msamples of acquisition memory (125 Msamples standard)
• Power analysis
• Bode plot frequency response analysis
• 16 digital-logic inputs
• Bus decoding that includes I²C, SPI, UART, and automotive Ethernet 10Base-T1S