Over the Memorial Day weekend I had a chance to spend a little bit of time with my new Agilent DSO1014A oscilloscope.

The Agilent 1000 family was just introduced on May 4th, 2009.  Since it’s a brand new model, I had to look around a bit to find one in stock at one of Agilent’s distributors.  Agilent quoted a 6-8 week leadtime and said I probably wouldn’t be able to find one anywhere before late June, but with a little searching I spotted one at Newark Electronics.  Two days later, it was running a self calibration in my lab.  Thanks, Newark!

The DSO1014A is a digital storage oscillscope.  The primary advantage of a digital oscilloscope over a traditional analog scope is that waveforms can be easily captured and analyzed even after the original signal is long gone.  Brief transients in the input signals can be viewed by carefully triggering a digital storage oscilloscope.  This is almost impossible to do with a simple analog scope.

Here’s a brief feature list for the DSO1014A along with some of my notes:

• 100MHz bandwidth (the higher end DSO1024A has 200MHz BW)
• 4 channels (most low cost scopes only have 2, this was a big selling point)
• 1GS/s sampling rate per channel (pretty standard), 2GS/s in half channel mode (impressive!)
• 10kpts/channel record length, 20kpts/s in half channel mode (another big selling point for me)
• front panel USB connector for recording screenshots to USB stick (yes!!!)

This scope will be a huge upgrade from the analog scope I have been using (an ancient 20MHz Hitachi V212).  While it won’t be able to view USB 2.0 eye diagrams, it should be more than good enough for general purpose use around the lab.

To see more photos of the scope, check out the full album on Flickr.