Scopes score for speed, memory and price

A new family of compact, portable digital oscilloscopes, the DL1700E Series, combines high-speed acquisition with long memory at prices starting from less than Eur 6000.

A new family of compact, portable digital oscilloscopes, the DL1700E Series, combines high-speed acquisition with long memory at prices starting from less than Eur 6000.

Despite its compact size and attractive price, the DL1700E Series offers a set of features that surpasses that of much larger instruments, including an optional built-in printer.

Like all Yokogawa's digital oscilloscopes, the instrument is designed to combine long memory with an all-points display and fast acquisition and update rates.

The DL1700E Series instruments have 500MHz bandwidth, two or four channels, can sample as fast as 1Gsample/s, and have up to 8M points of memory per channel.

The instruments are small and portable, weighing only 5.5kg and occupying a footprint the size of an A4 sheet of paper.

Oscilloscopes with long memories are important because they allow users to capture data over longer periods of time while maintaining sufficiently fast sample rates to capture short-term events.

While many oscilloscopes on the market offer long memory, Yokogawa's instruments differ from the competition in that every waveform point saved in memory is displayed on the screen, even with long record lengths.

Despite the long memory and all-points display, the DL7100E guarantees acquisition and update rates of 30 times per second for a 1M point-per-channel acquisition.

If faster acquisitions are required, the instrument can be operated in "Single(N)" acquisition mode, in which N acquisitions are captured as quickly as possible and any extraneous calculations are delayed until the acquisition is completed.

The DL7100E also offers the ability to view and analyse previously acquired waveforms using a "history memory" function.

In addition, a feature known as 'history search' enables users to quickly find previously acquired waveforms that meet (or fail to meet) user-defined conditions.

This helps engineers to detect intermittent events that may happen only once or twice in thousands of measurements.

A variety of interfaces make it easy to remotely control the instrument and transfer data to a PC.

The DL7100E can be controlled from any network connection using the built-in web server and 10/100Base-T Ethernet connector.

It can also be linked directly to a PC via USB or GPIB interfaces.

Using the built-in FTP client/server function, the DL1700E can save data directly to a PC or network drive.

It also supports USB storage media and offers either a floppy disk drive or a Type II PCMCIA card drive for removable storage media.

Prices for the DL1700E Series start at Eur 5940 for a two-channel instrument and Eur 8415 for a four-channel instrument.

Back to top