Scroll through millions of waveform samples

-- Test & Measurement World, 2/14/2006 7:01:00 AM

Riding on the heels of the DPO7000 midrange oscilloscope release, Tektronix has released what can only be described as the high end of the low-end oscilloscope range with the DPO4000 series. In fact, the high end of the DPO4000 series carries the same $14,000 price as the low end of the DPO7000 series (see "Get the Big Waveform Picture").

Wave Inspector adds a knob and eight buttons to the scope's front panel. The knob has two parts: pan and zoom. Zoom, of course, expands the displayed waveform to give you more resolution. Pan lets you zip through the channel's memory on the instrument's display. You can control the speed of the panning by how far you turn the knob. A set of three buttons let you mark distinct points on a waveform so you can quickly move back and forth between points of interest. 

Next to the Wave Inspector buttons are two buttons marked "B1" and "B2" that let you use a particular characteristic of a waveform as a trigger. Once you find the point of interest from a captured waveform, you can use it to trigger the scope when the condition occurs again.

Besides having Tek's digital phosphor feature for finding waveform anomalies, the DPO4000 series boasts a 10.4-in. LCD display, second in size only to the DPO7000. It's also just 5.4-in.deep and comes in three four-channel models. (See the table for models, channels, bandwidth, sample rates, and prices.) The scopes also include a USB peripheral port on the front panel for saving data to a USB flash drive. They also have a slot for a CompactFlash drive.

A USB peripheral port on the rear panel lets you operate the scope from a PC. With that port, you can use National Instruments' SignalExpress Tektronix Edition, which comes with every DPO4000 scope.

The rear panel also contains a slot that lets you attach a locking cable to the scope, the same kind of locking cable used to keep laptop computers from walking away. You can use the lock to keep your test setup intact. (See Martin Rowe's commentary: I love my scope, and you can't use it.)

Tektronix, www.tektronix.com