Editor's Pick: Touchscreen Oscilloscopes Simplify Zone Triggering

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

 Many test engineers find themselves muttering “Here we go now ... I'm lost in the ozone again” after getting all bollixed up setting zone triggers on their oscilloscope. It's easy to see why. Often there are a dozen or so steps. Well, here’s a cool item that came in over the wires recently that seems something to fuss over.

Keysight Technologies has launched the InfiniiVision 3000T X-Series digital storage and mixed signal oscilloscopes for the mainstream scope-using market. Don’t be fooled by that mainstream tag. It has to refer to pricing for benchtop devices. The 3000T X-Series does stuff that defies being defined by that word.

For one, it has an 8.5-in. touchscreen and a touch user interface. This is not a mere “turn this function on or off” interface. It’s software engineered to work like a good app on your touch tablet, only it’s designed for operating an oscilloscope.

Now, get this: Say you spot a signal anomaly that you want to isolate. On the instrument display you can draw a box around the signal anomaly and create a zone trigger using your finger. You then tell the InfiniiVision 3000T X-Series what sort of zone trigger to use by tapping an option from a pull-down menu. That’s your trigger setup to isolate a problem area.

And then there’s an update rate of 1 million waveforms per second. Really. That should help you find anomalies in a big way.

A third mainstream-defying quality is what you can get out of the box: protocol analysis capability, a digital voltmeter, a function/arbitrary waveform generator and an eight-digit hardware counter/totalizer. You also get a new gated fast Fourier transform function that lets you correlate time and frequency domain phenomenon on a single screen, which is a first in the mainstream category according to Keysight.

Today’s Pick of the Week link takes you to more on the InfiniiVision 3000T X-Series oscilloscopes. Make sure to hit the link at the end of the new product write-up to access a dedicated page on the series. Watch the video. It’s short and informative.

Using the InfiniiVision 3000T X-Series 8.5-inch touchscreen, engineers can create a zone trigger by drawing a box around a signal of interest on the instrument display with their finger. Image courtesy of Keysight Technologies Inc.

Also, take the Trigger Challenge. You get to draw a box around an anomaly using your mouse. It’s fun, but it also shows you that you do not have to channel a few lines from “Lost in the Ozone” when setting up triggers on an oscilloscope any more.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Learn more about the InfiniiVision 3000T X-Series oscilloscopes.