Just a comment in general here. There is that decision to go boat anchor
HP or new Chinese. For years, I went boat anchor. However the Rigol
stuff is pretty good. [They OEM the cheaper Agilent gear.] You need to
evaluate your goals for the instrument. If you working in a corporation
and trying to correlate bench test data to ATE, you probably ought to
shell out for Agilent gear. But for home use, you are not going to be
paying for a test lab to do your yearly cal, nor are you selling a
product where a tenth of a dB makes a difference in your revenue. That
said, Rigol hardware to me seems like the solution.
I have one of their scopes. I don't have any issues with the hardware,
but these people can't program Windows to save their arses. I'm being
kind here. Getting the scope to work on win7 was ugly. I was pulling
DLLs off the net (and not from trusted sources in my opinion) to get the
software to work. Now their gear also supports writing to thumb drives.
There is some freeware that makes that a suitable solution.
I haven't sprung for a spectrum analyzer from Rigol, but it isn't out of
the question. I can tell you the scope is quite intuitive to run, so I
have no fear of operating the gear. PC interface is another story. I
would zero out any hope of PC interface, and if it works, consider it a
bonus. China runs on stolen copies of XP. Maybe once XP is truly EOL,
they will buy win7 and deliver more modern software. [Note the
programmers in Asia do fine on smart phones, since there is no incentive
to use a free but obsolete OS. Rather they lose money if they don't use
the most up to date OS.]
Note there are also black box spectrum analyzers. However there you are
actually depending on their software to work. Worse yet, windows changes
enough that your black box no longer works and you are stuck running an
old OS just to use the gear. [This is extremely common in labs where an
instrument was built around a PC. I've seen win3.11 running in the
current century. You paid a quarter million for some box, you damn well
aren't going to get a new model just to run win 7.]
Taking a photo of an instrument display might be considered lame, but it
gets the job done. That may be your only documentation if you get Rigol
gear. You may recall Jim Williams was a real fan of scope photos because
the customer knew the measurements were not massaged.
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