Out in Front: September 2, 1996

Tektronix wants to give back 75% of the bench space that your DSO has been occupying. To reclaim those precious square inches, the TDS 210 and 220 bid farewell to the CRT and replace it with a bright, high-contrast, back-lit LCD having a diagonal measurement of approximately 6 in. The resulting package sports a front panel that, at 6×12 in., is slightly smaller than the panels of conventional scopes. The new scopes are only 4(1/3) in. deep, however, and weigh in at just 4.25 lbs.

To be sure, handheld LCD DSOs, including Tek's TDS 700 series, occupy a still smaller volume and offer other advantages, such as battery power. Although handheld scopes have proven very successful in field service and maintenance, Tek believes that most design engineers will continue to demand scopes that were designed for the benchtop: To save space, nearly all handheld DSOs substitute unfamiliar pushbuttons for benchtop scopes' standard rotary controls. Unlike handheld units, the TDS 210 and 220 use a familiar control layout. Users can choose be-tween two plug-in accessories. One adds a printer port; the other includes an RS-232C port, an IEEE-488 port, and a printer port. Because battery power is rarely a requirement on the benchtop but external power supplies can be a nuisance, the new scopes are ac-line-operated (90 to 250V, 47 to 63 Hz), and their supplies are internal.

The TDS 210 and 220 are two-channel, real-time-sampling units that use a 1G-sample/sec ADC on each channel. The TDS 210 offers 60-MHz bandwidth. At $995, this scope costs less than any other Tek DSO and less than DSOs of comparable bandwidth from most competitors. The $1695 TDS 220 offers 100-MHz bandwidth. In addition, both scopes include a peak-detect mode that eliminates the need for deep memory to eliminate aliasing at low sweep speeds. Memory depth is 2.5k samples.

—by Dan Strassberg

Tektronix Inc, Beaverton, OR. (800) 479-4490, http://www.tek.com/Measurement.