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Re: [Phys-l] Tektronix vs. Agilent Scopes



For those unfamiliar with the companies, Tektronix has been Tektronix for a long time. Agilent, however, used to be Hewlett-Packard.

I have a lot of experience with Tektronix and Hewlett-Packard oscilloscopes but do not have Agilent scopes because we found that we preferred the Tektronix scopes over the HP scopes.

The reason had nothing to do with ruggedness nor with accuracy nor expected life. Rather, the primary difference was the user interface. Tektronix historically tended to use slide switches and HP tended to use latching pushbuttons. We found that with slide switches the students made fewer errors because it is easy to see which way the switch is thrown. With a latching pushbutton switch it is more difficult to tell if the switch is depressed or not-depressed (in or out), and on top of that you have to understand which feature depressed selects verses which feature not-depressed represents.

Students grew to hate pushbutton switches on oscilloscopes, as do I.

As we moved to the digital-scope age it's a different situation. Non-latching pushbuttons can select various menus, and options on the menus can be toggled or scroll with buttons or with rotary knobs. With these scopes I think it still boils down to the user interface, but the use interface has completely changed from "positions of switches" to "toggling through menu options."

Before you buy too many of one particular kind, I would evaluate which one has the more intuitive user interface. I cannot answer this for Tektronix verses Agilent because we don't have any Agilent digital scopes. But we do have Instek scopes that are knock-offs of Tektronix scopes, and the Tektronix scopes are more intuitive in my opinion.

Also determine how easy it is for students to save and retrieve data. The Tektronix scopes we currently use have USB interfaces into which students can insert a "USB Thumb Drive" and easily store data as ASCII files that are easily read into a spread sheet such as MS-Excel. One problem we have had with this is that the scopes we currently have will not work with a thumb-drives larger than 2MB, and today most student have thumb-drives larger than that. So this is another thing you should check out.

Also, for the instructor, evaluate how easily the scope can be connected to a computer or directly to an LCD projector so you can project the scope screen to the whole class. Some scopes have better interfaces than others for this type of use.

As for durability of the BNC connectors... we've never had a problem with this on any of our scopes. Are your students using steroids?


Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemistry and Physics
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu