Rack mounted oscilloscope lowers cost per channel

This allows researchers and scientists to gather more accurate data and gain deeper insights into their machines while reducing test equipment space requirements.

Along with the low-profile model, Tektronix also announced a series of optional power analysis and serial trigger/decode solutions for aerospace and automotive markets for the 5 Series MSOs for aerospace and automotive markets for the 5 Series MSO.

Rack-mounted oscilloscopes are commonly used to evaluate the performance of various “machines” in such application areas as high energy physics (pulsed power), military and government for weapons testing and materials research.

Software is typically used to control the instrument remotely.

As with ATE applications, engineers and researchers often struggle to put together cost-effective data acquisition solutions with enough performance and channels to better monitor their experiments and overcome space constraints.

“Among the many innovations in the 5 Series MSO, FlexChannel technology that packs eight analogue channels or up to 64 digital channels in a fraction of the space of traditional benchtop scopes truly stands out and delivers significant benefits for machine diagnostics and similar research and production test applications,” said Brian Ice, general manager, Mainstream Oscilloscopes, Tektronix. “Along the same lines, the 12-bit ADC is also a big win for customers because it allows them to obtain more complete, more accurate data that could someday lead to significant breakthroughs, such as self-sustaining fusion reactors.”

Conventional benchtop oscilloscopes used for machine diagnostics applications require 6U of rack space and yet provide only four input channels. The 5 Series MSO Low Profile offers a six times improvement in channel density made possible by its combination of 8 FlexChannel inputs and its robust, space-saving 2U package. It also comes with a competitive price of less than $5,000 per channel. 

With 1GHz analogue bandwidth, 6.25 GS/s sample rate on all channels, and 125 M record length, the MSO has the performance researchers and engineers need to capture accurate waveform data with high signal integrity.

With 12-bit ADCs, lower noise and a high 7.6-bit ENOB (effective number of bits), the MSO reveals deeper insight by showing more signal details compared to 8-bit oscilloscopes.