ANALOG OSCILLOSCOPES

ASCEND ELECTRONICS® OPTIO MAXIMA – TRUE ANALOG OSCILLOSCOPE FAMILY

With the Ascend Electronics® OPTIO MAXIMA, the signal you see is what is really there!  

The natures of things are analog, not digital! As such, analog oscilloscopes have a few advantages over a digital scope with equivalent signal-integrity performance. First, the analog scopes are lower in cost and have higher signal bandwidth and writing speed than their equivalent counterparts. They have no signal waveform distortion due to aliasing caused by Nyquist- sampling and under-sampling limitation and do not need signal sample interpolation. Analog scope captures the signal waveform in one sweep; no sequential equivalent-time sampling is required, a major advantage in finding high-speed transient glitches. The only way to capture fast single-shot transients with a digital oscilloscope is by using a Real-time sampling technic, which requires very high sample rates and extremely short holdoff times. Lower-cost digital scopes have low sample rates and a very long holdoff time to process the sampled data. New trigger events cannot be recognized during this time, and random transient glitches are missed. Measure a complex signal, having its highest frequency component of interest at 20MHz, can be easily done using the OPTIO MAXIMA 506122, 20MHz oscilloscope. To observe the same signal on a digital oscilloscope, the digital sampling rate needs to be about 20-fold higher (400Msps) than the highest observed frequency of the signal, which requires a Nyquist bandwidth of 200MHz, to ensure that enough points in one “sweep” of the waveform are acquire to construct an accurate picture of the waveform. For a signal with a 100MHz frequency component of interest, an analog oscilloscope of 100MHz bandwidth would provide a perfect representation of the signal.
On the other hand, the digital scope would need s sample rate of 2GHz, and to get a good dynamic range, 14 or 16-bit resolution would be required, which is very expensive. Higher bandwidth also means higher parasitic noise levels in the signal to measure. Finally, analog scopes have a greater dynamic range; they are not limited to 8 or 12 bits in resolution.

The OPTIO MAXIMA oscilloscopes are very easy to use and powerful but lower in cost. They make them an excellent tool for Lab-, Test- and Manufacturing Environments and advanced hobbyist and educational use. OPTIO MAXIMA series delivers outstanding and accurate performance and does not require ADC, µP (Microprocessor), and acquisition memory for measurement.