Re: 7K series - Conceptual question - What's the 3rd most useful plugin
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Harvey White
On Wed, 05 Sep 2018 17:29:59 -0700, you wrote:
Crap, now you guys have added to my wishlist the 7D20 and 7A13! Oops, I spoke too soon, the 7A13 is already on the wishlist!<evil laugh> Now, also consider, if you do some digital, the 7A42 is a 4 channel plugin with combinational logic triggering. It is useful if you don't have a separate logic analyzer. Having said that, I *do* have a logic analyzer, and I've never used mine (the 7A42). There's essentially three directions you can go into with electronics design. 1) digital 2) RF 3) general purpose. For Digital: 7A26 (a pair of them), 7D20 (yes, and even though you have a storage scope, a digital storage scope provides a longer lasting trace). 7D02 *if* you deal with microprocessors and they're old ones (anything newer than an AVR and including an AVR, Pic, etc... any microcontroller, a 7D02 is likely to be less useful.) 7A42. for RF: Consider any of the 7L spectrum analyzers depending on the frequencies you want to play with. Not quite my field, and there are other analyzers out there with better specs, ask the RF types. General: Here's where the 7A13 comes in, for the low level, moderately low frequency differential measurements (ripple on a power supply, etc.) The 7A22 has different bandwidth filters, and less neat offset capability. The 7A26 allows two more analog channels. 7A18 can also be considered if you only want 75 Mhz bandwidth. When doing digital, you often want to look at more than four signals. At this point, a logic analyzer is really your best bet (and I assume all the signals are digital in nature). As a separate piece of equipment, you'd want one that has at least 32 channels, and yes, I do use that many. (monitoring *all* the ports on an ARM processor, with one that has 4 16 bit ports, well, you need 64 data inputs. Even though the processor I use (format wise) doesn't have a complete set of the last 16 bits in a port, it still takes 16 bits capability, so 64 bits). When doing RF: If you're a ham, then anything up to 1.2 Ghz covers most of the bands you'd use, but above that means you're doing some specialized (IMHO) microwave work. YMMV on this. If you're doing Digital, or general purpose, and you are doing either B, G, or N WiFi, or you're doing NRF24xxx 2.4 GHz RF, you may want a spectrum analyzer that goes to about 3 GHz, but certainly takes in the 2.4 to 2.5 Ghz band. There are ways of working around this, but still, much nicer. General purpose has the fewest real specialized plugins, but the 7a13 (and mine are all digital because I *like* digital) are useful, as are the 7A22. Again, the 7A22 has a whole host of bandwidth filters to allow you to look at a specific frequency. There are HF filters and low frequency filters so you could look at a specific bandwith in the face of other frequencies, and still get a good idea. There's other stuff out there, too, I'm sure. I do a lot of digital, some general purpose, and not a lot of RF. The 7904 I have is very useful, as is the Agilent 16702B logic analyzer. My more or less favorite load on a 7904 is a 7A26, 7D12 with an M2 plugin (sampling), a 7D15 in a horizontal slot, and a 7B92A in the last horizontal slot. That, of course, varies. Harvey
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