Informative, innovative and interesting articles from our favorite blogs and website

As hard as it is for me to believe, I turned 50 years old this year.  What, how did THAT happen?!?!  My wonderful wife planned a very special surprise party for me.  She knows, just as most of my friends and family know, how passionate I am about my job and the test & measurement equipment that I support, use and play with.  With that in mind, she had some awesome desserts custom made for the party!

We’re excited to introduce a new series here at Bandwidth Banter; The Tek Pulse is a roundup of the latest articles of interest in the engineering, technology and science industries that deserve a click. Do you have a great article, blog or idea that you’d like to see featured in our new series?

In a previous blog post I discussed the concept of using the RF input on a mixed domain oscilloscope (MDO) as a trigger source for acquisition across analog and digital signals, and provided details about how this trigger source operates. Integral to this was the concept of the RF acquisition bands, or block-conversion, bands. These block-conversion bands are also central to understanding the RF capture bandwidth of the MDO.

Today, Tektronix launched the TBS1000 Series of digital oscilloscopes aimed at start-up businesses, schools, and serious hobbyists. 

TBS1152 Two-channel Digital Storage Oscilloscope, 150 MHz, 1 GS/s

The time appears to be right.

Recently I had a chance to revisit my path from the design bench to the world of sales. Our sales organization was in the process of adding some field applications engineers (FAE), and I found myself advising prospects about how life would be different if they were to become FAEs. While I am currently a regional sales manager, my first job off the bench was as an applications engineer for Tektronix. Since this is a choice many design engineers may consider at some point, I thought it would be good blog fodder.

The trigger features and controls on modern oscilloscopes have come a long way since the introduction of triggered sweep oscilloscopes 65 years ago. These controls have evolved from simple edge triggering on a rising or falling edge of a signal with some possible filtering to very sophisticated advanced functions that can trigger on glitches, runts, specific widths, logical combinations of signals and digital data patterns.

Tektronix recently introduced the TLA6400, a performance leap in the world of value-priced monolithic bench-top logic analyzers.  Performance like this used to require more expensive card-modular systems, more suitable to ASIC designers than FPGA programmers or general purpose users.  However, with faster parallel bus signals (such as new high-speed COTS ADC’s and DDR memory), many designers find themselves needing performance logic analyzer specifications at budget-frie

First let me introduce myself -- W2AEW.  Amateur radio, commonly known as “ham radio” is a venerable hobby dating back to the inception of radio itself. With roots in the experiments of some of science’s greats, there is a homebrew aesthetic associated with radio that exists to this day despite the plethora of communications methods available to us now.  While the lure of communicating around the globe drew many hams into the hobby in the past, the draw today is generally an interest in technology or public service, or even designing and building equipment.