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The Signal Path has a teardown of the Keysight UXR oscilloscope, which has a BW of 110GHz and samples 4 channels at 256Gbps/channel, with 10bit resolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXYje2B04xE.

⬐ georgeburdell

Unrelated gripe about Keysight but they started requiring even buyers of this beast to have a support contract to get any technical support whatsoever. They used to answer simple questions for free even from hobbyists if you reached out.

⬐ RicoElectrico

This is ridiculous in the context how they promote their gear among students with competitions and giveaways.

⬐ numpad0

Conflict of interest between internal structures happen all the time.

⬐ scrlk

Keysight and their distributors will not sell to you if you are a hobbyist, they require that you show proof that you are a business:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/keysight-officially-l...

⬐ perihelions

Seems like spinning up a throwaway LLC would be a practical workaround/hack. What, are they going to send auditors after their own clients looking for *impostors*?

⬐ fsh

The quality of the written documentation is also abysmal compared to HP times. One often has to guess how to correctly use gear that costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

⬐ topspin

Two stages of quadrature downconvertion: input -> 64 GHz -> 8 GHz -> A/D samplers (x16).

Super Quadrodyne?

A decent understanding of SDR receivers is all you need to understand how this works. Same basic ideas, just one or two orders of magnitude faster. Incredible RF engineering; An Indium Phosphide (InP) stage feeds a Silicon-Germanium (SiGe) stage feeds about 9kg of custom CMOS DSP + high speed memory. A bargain at less than $1.5 million.

⬐ guerrilla

> $1.3 Million US dollars

Whoah whoah whoah what... Okay, I have no doubt it costs a ton to make this but can someone tell me how they got the contracts in order to actually produce this? Who needed this and who committed to pay upfront before it was fully developed?

[But omg these insufferable oscilloscope UIs. Please stop with this shit and just simplify it. We don't need fake bevels and ugly gradients.]

⬐ smitty1110

Guys working on satellite communications and radar installations operating in the W band, probably. I mean, compared to a satellite a million bucks isn’t a huge deal. Can’t fix the electronic once it’s in low earth orbit.

⬐ verall

Some people work on very high speed serdes or busses.

Imagine you have a hardware group of around 150 people led by a director, like 10-15 middle managers, some PMs, etc. Total comp for employees ranges from like 80k/yr for the team in a low CoL country to over 500k/yr for the director and tech leads. With support, offices, labs, sw, the group might cost like $150mm/yr. A few speed scopes just get budgeted in.

⬐ kens

In general I'm not a fan of year-stamping every post but I think it's relevant that this is from 2018.

⬐ tinco

Yup, it's the one you already watched if you've seen a teardown of a 100ghz scope before.

⬐ realcertify

You don't need to be into electronics to appreciate the beauty of such high-end devices. Overall the teardown videos of this Youtube channel are amazing.

⬐ guerrilla

If you're just starting out with electronics, then I HIGHLY recommend these teardowns of specifically these kinds of devices. Like start with old HP/Agilent, Keysight, Keithley bench multimeters... That stuff is just engineering art. This video though is about alien technology though for me, 256GS/s is basically magic as far as I'm concerned.

⬐ Stampo00

I'm a hobbyist who just bought his first oscilloscope at age 35. I've been a hobbyist since I was maybe 11, pestering the poor folks at my local Radioshack that was close enough to walk to.

Oscilloscopes have always been an object of desire for me, even though I rarely do anything that absolutely requires a scope, and seldom anything that would even be significantly easier with a scope.

I bought the most expensive one (or the second-cheapest one, depending on how you look at it) that was stocked at my local Microcenter. It was about $500. I feel guilty since I don't really, truly need it. But I love my new toy. I'm only really using it at this point like a multimeter with a histogram.

I was prepared to be drooling watching this video, like a gearhead driving a Civic and spotting a Countach.

And... I wasn't! I mean, it's an amazing achievement! And I'm sure there are folks out there whose workflows would be vastly improved by a tool like this.

But I'm actually better served by the bluntness of my tool in comparison. The precision of this new Keysight scope is incredible, but you have to understand the trade-offs and side effects of the choices that had to be made to allow for its performance. Those noise patterns and ringing he shows when he hooks up the scope to the old function generator would have me chasing my tail if I saw them while troubleshooting one of my projects.

I'm sure design choices of my scope also cause various artifacts in the signal. But it's so minor that my scope would probably only barely be able to detect them above its noise floor since it's resolution is so much coarser.

I could lust over the Countach, but the reality is, I probably couldn't drive it worth a damn, anyway. It would be wrapped around a tree within a week.

⬐ bdowling

From the video description:

> The 110GHz 4-channel variant of the UXR-Series oscilloscope has an MSRP of $1.3 Million US dollars.

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⬐ Stampo00

That scope is a marvel!

But I don't find myself lusting over it. Maybe because I can't imagine being able to afford it in even my wildest dreams. But, realistically, I think its level of precision would not only be wasted on me, I think it might be actively harmful to my productivity and understanding at this point in my hobby.

There's a reason people sometimes choose to use measuring tape instead of a microscope. ;-)

⬐ nsxwolf

This scope seems to be out of reach of hobbyists.

⬐ pmorici

Their entry level scopes start around $500 and comes standard with protocol decoding for i2c and serial.

https://www.keysight.com/us/en/products/oscilloscopes/infini...

Perhaps my favorite debugging tool though is the Saleae Logic. It's a does digital logic and analog in one and has a lot of protocol support.

https://www.saleae.com/

⬐ IshKebab

I wouldn't buy a "real" Saleae though. Insanely overpriced these days. You can buy clones for literally a 50th of the price.

⬐ TomVDB

I have clones and I have the real one.

The clones are a copy of the Saleae units from 10 years ago. They’re not at all comparable to the current high-end ones.

One of the killer features of the current ones is the ability to also record an analog trace. It’s fantastic when you need to record minutes of something that misbehaves electrically every once in a while.

⬐ pmorici

I’ve bought several real ones over the years. They are great it isn’t worth wasting time with shitty debugging tools. They cost more than they used too sure but they are also massively useful and a great bargain for the features you get.

⬐ waswaswas

Overpriced relative to the COGS of the hardware, and yet a bargain compared to what you get from any other test equipment company for the same money. The magic is in the software, and I’d much rather pay for that excellent software via expensive hardware than go back to a pre-Saleae world.

⬐ IshKebab

I guess. I haven't used their software but I watched a brief video and I don't know if I'd want to pay £400 for it if it was my own money. PulseView seems comparable in capability.

I does still feel overpriced if you ask me. You can get a full Bluetooth Analyser with actually advanced software (I mean there's a huge difference between writing a protocol analyser for SPI or I2C or typical things that run on them, and Bluetooth) for like £1k.

But I guess it one of those things that is aimed at people who aren't using their own money so they make the most money by charging enterprise prices.

⬐ kurthr

The probes for this scope are out of the reach of hobbyists!

Get a 100MHz 4 Channel Hantek for $400 and it will do almost everything you can wrap your head around. Wires start looking like waveguides at 1GHz, much less 110GHz (That's almost infrared!).

⬐ cycomanic

I generally agree, but I disagree with calling 1 mm IR. That's sort of arguing that the whole THz range is IR which I think is silly (I note that you did not make this up, but it is somewhat commonly used)

⬐ kurthr

I kinda agree 1THz is considered Far IR at 100um, which is a LOT of bandwidth! From working with folks who did Tunnel Junction mixers, I think it's because things start looking particle-like, beyond wave-like at those frequencies.

I guess it's actually called EHF up to 300GHz.

⬐ topspin

At these frequencies the conductors inside chips are giant inductors. 110 GHz... the engineering here is really next level.

⬐ type0

yes and there's these for some models https://github.com/OpenHantek/openhantek

⬐ mindcrime

Tell me about it. I'm just a hobbyist myself, but for $REASONS I splurged on a moderately high-end (albeit used) Keysight logic analyzer a while back. And the probes for that dang thing are approximately more expensive (new) than the analyzer itself was. I still only have half a set for that reason. So yeah, probes for high-end gear are a unique and expensive beast all apart from the rest. :-(

⬐ showerst

If you're in the US and near a major metro, keep an eye on bidspotter. Every once in a while you can catch a lot of high end test gear and/or accessories at lower prices than ebay.

⬐ kurthr

Yeah, even with differential 100x probes, how do you get a controlled measurement from the test unit (antenna/amp) to the 110GHz instrument? I've used 25GHz spectrum analyzers and probes... and they're nuts!

⬐ CamperBob2

If you wait by the eBay river long enough, it too will come floating by.

⬐ formerly_proven

This is unlikely because most new-ish equipment will be traded in or is leased outright, and will go to the crusher instead of being sold on the used market. Manufacturers obviously don't want a large used market.

⬐ jacquesm

Sorry for the horrible link, but this one seems to be an older generation of a similar device.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/255302112122?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DI...

⬐ exikyut

Huh, 20-up-to-80GHz for $165. Oookayyyy. Riight then.

(NB, the only critical bit an eBay link is the item ID, ie (/itm/[0-9]+).)

⬐ jacquesm

165K!

⬐ exikyut

Facepalm D:. I don't know how I managed to leave that off. Still not used to the extra fiddliness of typing on a phone keyboard :(

⬐ jacquesm

No problem :) Anyway, the point was that you can find the weirdest stuff on ebay, even ridiculously high end stuff from a couple of years ago. And of course $165K is still a fairly large chunk of cash for a second hand scope (to put it mildly) but it's about 10% of what it originally sold for.

⬐ exikyut

Thanks. A random question this makes me think of: I've had "get an oscilloscope" on the one-day queue for quite a while, and I might be looking at actually being able to get one at last. For someone trying to balance a) understanding how not to blow it up, b) understanding how not to blow up what I'm poking at, and c) wrangling the newfound ability to MeAsUrE eVeRyThInG ("forget sleep, what does *that* trace do????")... I'm ultimately going to prefer (the confidence boost of) starting with a scope cheap enough to blow up instead of nuking my {computer, phone, AC outlet, USB charger, ebike charge circuit, FPGA devkit, ...} - but at the same time I'll definitely want to play with LVDS, MIPI, low-rate serdes stuff too, etc. All while I have exactly zero formal understanding of the basics >:D (hence the "blow up the scope first" bit...).

I guess I wonder if there's a reconcilable Venn diagram of viability somewhere in there, and if there is, what it might look like. (I think I'm looking at the oscilloscope as a C compiler, and electronics as Spicy Assembly xD)

⬐ vanchor3

Not sure if you just made a typo there, but that's 20GHz, up to 80GSa/s (GigaSamples per second).

⬐ exikyut

Thanks. TIL I really shouldn't be commenting on things I don't properly understand and not reading listing titles properly... right.

Stays extra far away from heavy machinery for today

⬐ cycomanic

While that is true, equivalent time sampling oscilloscopes with high bandwidth optical heads from the 90-00s still sell for 5 figures on ebay, so arguably still out of typical hobbyist ranges.

⬐ the_only_law

I'm still waiting for the day some weird niche, Rohde & Schwarz equipment I saw once and thought "that'd be cool to have" pops up on ebay.

Unfortunately their stuff in ebay is still pretty expensive secondhand, unless it's something hardly anyone except hardcore hobbyists would want, like television demodulators.

I do have some old Keysight stuff (well, most of it is HP and Agilent which ofc birthed Keysight) most of it was still several hundred dollars a price, mostly mid-80s-90s telecom equipment.

⬐ mindcrime

Old HP / Agilent / Keysight (aka HPAK) stuff does show up on Ebay for decent prices from time to time, so long as you don't need the specs of the latest and newest gear. And hobbyists usually don't. Personally all of the "purchased new" test equipment in my home lab is Rigol, and almost all of the "purchased used" is HPAK. It makes a nice balance.

Now to score one of those HP 3458A's one of these days...

⬐ synu

They’ve been giving their devices away to every electronics YouTuber, you really see them everywhere plus the sponsored ads. I’m not really sure how many hobbyists really need a scope like what they make, though.

⬐ mindcrime

Keysight make gear that spans a pretty broad range of applications and price points. They don't necessarily outright target hobbyists the way Rigol or Siglent or some other brands do, but they have pointedly introduced some new lower-end hobbyist/student focused kit over the last couple of years. But their bread and butter still seems to be stuff that's sold in volumes of like 2 or 3 a year, for millions of $$$ and probably goes to places like Los Alamos or JPL or something...

⬐ exmadscientist

Their bread and butter is the midrange, same as it has always been. That's the area centered around $10k (at least for scopes; meters are lower and spec ans are higher), and is where the price-volume product is best.

The low-end crap is not particularly profitable, but best not to cede to your rivals as long as you can at least break even.

The high-end stuff makes great marketing and probably sells better than 3 per year... though that might just be 4. JPL and Los Alamos don't really need this stuff, though they probably have something somewhere. It's really designed for high-bit-rate stuff. I seem to recall DDR5 lowest-level debug being a major use case for the UXR in the early promo materials. I'd imagine it's also pretty good for some LTE stuff. And phased-array radars, because it seems like that's always what the highest-end stuff is for, no matter what it is.

⬐ mindcrime

OK, yeah, saying "2 or 3" wasn't meant to be completely literal. The point was just to say that they cover a broad range of market segments. I'm not so concerned about the exact details, especially regarding the really high-end, exotic stuff that I'll probably never touch.

⬐ cycomanic

I suspect they still sell as many of these they can reasonably make, which I suspect will be significantly more than 2 or 3. I personally know of at least 5 labs who bought at least one of these in the last 2 or 3 years (I believe the URX platform is like 3 or 4 years old, but maybe wasn't at 110 GHz at the beginning)

⬐ __init

Erm, I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but they certainly are not giving these away to youtubers. This is a >$1 million instrument that isn't even very useful for hobbyist electronics. The ones they give away are from their new EDU line that does around 100 MHz sampling.

⬐ guerrilla

They didn't say this device (although they are around) but their devices, meaning from low to high-end.

⬐ synu

I just meant they are giving their devices away to lots of streamers. It’s hard to find any electronics channel not sponsored by them, or where the host doesn’t have and is giving more devices away to viewers.

⬐ seabird

If you need this equipment, you're not a hobbyist.

⬐ the_only_law

Well, I don't need one.

⬐ dapids

That's because its not a hobbyist scope.

⬐ anuvrat1

Most probably, you need some sort of government approval to buy it.

⬐ cycomanic

No you don't. Source: I bought previous generation top of the line scopes as well as similar lecroy ones and have colleagues who just bought this device.

⬐ anuvrat1

Thanks for correcting me, but what about selling to "non-western" countries?

⬐ duskwuff

I mean, yes. Keysight's test equipment skews towards the high end in general, and this is their absolute top-of-the-line oscilloscope -- it is quite likely the highest performance oscilloscope available on the market. It costs around $1.3M before you start configuring options.

This isn't a general-purpose instrument. It's intended for engineers debugging systems which use extremely high-speed signalling. Even in a commercial environment, hardware like this would be unusual, and very few people would have access to it.

⬐ GravitasFailure

Rohde & Schwarz has the ZVA, but that's a two port unit while Keysight has 4. I haven't seen anyone else come close.

As for hobbyists... I'd love to hear of a hobby project that could make use of this.

Edit: Yeah, I'm thinking of the Keysight PNA-X which is a four port VNA. Still haven't seen anything come close to either offering, though.

⬐ cycomanic

The ZVA is not the same use case as this. The competitor to URX is the teledyne lecroy lab master which also has 110 GHz bandwidth. The difference is that teledyne uses bandwidth interleaving, which keysight argues is inferior (they are probably correct, keysight has some ENOB advantages, however teledyne has other advantages). Tektronix has essentially left the competition for this super high end, they didn't manage to go beyond 70 GHz (which was some years back for all of these)

⬐ dhdc

The ZVA is an vector network analyzer, not an oscilloscope. Don't get me wrong, the ZVA is still an extremely impressive piece of engineering, but not even close to what Keysight had achieved with the UXR.

⬐ GravitasFailure

Derp! I got this confused with the PNA-X, which is a four port VNA that does 110GHz with additional heads. Thanks for the correction.

Remember, caffeine first, then internet.

⬐ DoingIsLearning

> Even in a commercial environment, hardware like this would be unusual, and very few people would have access to it.

For most companies it's kind difficult to justify the investment, if they need equipment this accurate at this frequency they will just rent it from a third party Test Lab during hardware verification stages.

⬐ rkagerer

What are some interesting examples of applications / projects where this is or would be used?

⬐ cycomanic

Big customers are researchers and developers in optical communications, where you have signals that go to these bandwidths. Also microwave engineers working on next generation wireless systems, as well as people working in THz communications. Those are the ones I know about, I'm sure there are many customers in defence/security but I have no idea about those applications.

⬐ capableweb

> Also microwave engineers working on next generation wireless systems

Aha, so now even fricking microwaves are getting WiFi? What's next?!

⬐ kanetw

PCIe gen4+ compliance testing and debugging

⬐ AdamH12113

I saw a Keysight scope in this range (might have been the same one) at a trade show a few years back. The salesperson said people were using them with 77 GHz automotive radar systems. The display showed the scope doing real-time FFTs at that frequency.

⬐ showerst

I really think Shahriar makes some of the best niche content out there.

He has this wealth of incredibly specialized high end knowledge, but much of the equipment he tears down is just the absolute bleeding edge (or former bleeding edge) of stuff you can find in a normal lab. It's so cool to see what you have to change to squeeze three orders of magnitude more performance out compared to the $300 siglent on my bench.

Not that I'm ever really going to fix a 20,000 piece of test gear by identifying a shorted resistor working backwards from the block diagram, but I feel like I'm at least learning a ton watching him do it =).

It's funny to compare him to BigClive, who comes across as very working-class and mostly tears down the cheapest AliExpress junk, but their actual approach and content is very similar in many ways.

⬐ ktm5j

Totally agree, I've been a long time fan of his channel. I don't have any real background in EE other than some personal projects with microcontrollers and fpgas but I've always been interested in the subject in free content like this has been a great way to learn. I would say that I'm a bigger fan of Ben Krasnow's channel applied science because it aligns better with my interests, but love them both :)

⬐ jamesfmilne

Big Clive just comes across as Scottish to me.

- Another Scotsman

⬐ guerrilla

> It's funny to compare him to BigClive, who comes across as very working-class and mostly tears down the cheapest AliExpress junk,

Hey hey hey now, BigClive does lots of stuff that's not from AliExpress/eBay like giant HV transformers, traffic signals, pedestrial detectors[1], etc. But yeah, all of that kind of matches his blue collar persona while both being equally technical.

1. https://youtu.be/y14B18OMBF8

I knew this was going to be Shahriar from TheSignalPath.

If you even have a passing interest in electronics or radio, I can't recommend his channel enough. He's regularly doing teardowns and even repairs on remarkably complex (and expensive!) test equipment from the past few decades. RF is weird and you'll see some complex and alien physical configurations in the equipment that many times look like dark arts. He puts a lot of effort into his videos and the scenarios he creates to demonstrate the power that this technology brings to the table.

This 128GHz FFT is insane. I'm honestly a little surprised that this doesn't have ITAR regulations on it:

https://youtu.be/DXYje2B04xE?t=2628

⬐ systemvoltage

Also to note that his videos have no fluff besides a few seconds of intro. There is no background music, non-sense commercialization and over-production of videos. It is along the lines of EEVBlog and other channels.

This format is amazing but highly unpopular in other fields. People want more entertainment and a lot of content creators succumb against their will to stay afloat. Linus Tech Tips and MBKHD are the worst offenders of this.

BPS.space - Model rockets - 133k - https://youtu.be/OE0_-g7YV1M

OskarPuzzle - 3D printed puzzles - 110k - https://youtu.be/B3XY6HkVFR0

The Signal Path - RF electronics - 66k - https://youtu.be/DXYje2B04xE