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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Scope showtime

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In the news column I’ve recently posted a report on Rohde& Schwarz’ introduction of two series of digital oscilloscopes. Clearly, this is a big step for the company; in any sector, you need to think carefully about your prospects of breaking into a market which is so dominated by two major players (Tektronix, Agilent, of course) and in which the number three is also a strong contender (LeCroy). R&S says that it’s adding to its portfolio the one major measurement instrument that it doesn’t already make (though it bought the budget scope-maker Hameg about five years ago). It also disclosed that when it asked them, many of its instrument customers wanted R&S to make scopes, and of the rest, a large percentage thought it already did! The company is determinedly vague about its plans for market share, saying only that it wants to get to “double digits” and acknowledging that this might take “a year or two”.
Recently the specification battleground on scopes has shifted; at the top, there is the out-and-out fastest-sampling-rate contest; otherwise it seems to be recognised that they all basically do what it says on the box, and the argument moves to the finer points of, in particular, acquisition, processing and signal display rates. And, the user interface.
In many years of reporting such things, I think that R&S’s demo of the user interface on its RTO scope was the most impressive since, perhaps, HP’s (I’m going back before there was Agilent) HP1980. That was (as I’m sure you recall) the first scope to feature an “autoset” button – feed it a waveform, press the button, there was a chattering of relays and a couple of cycles of the waveform appeared. For its time, pure T&M magic.
For its press demo, R&S had interfaced its scope to a touch-screen display of, perhaps, 50-inch size. With some élan, and not a few sweeping gestures, R&D manager Dr Markus Freidhof positioned waveforms, invoked measurement functions, allocated screen windows and set parameters – all without ever touching the instrument itself. If you are moved to spend upwards of €12000 for one of these units, I’d budget another few hundred for a 24-inch HD monitor with touch interface – the scope itself has a perfectly good 10.8-inch panel, but this user interface just begs you to drag your traces around on something bigger, believe me.

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