Buying your first oscilloscope is one of the most important steps you can take if you want to move beyond basic electronics troubleshooting. A multimeter can tell you that a voltage is present, but it cannot show you how that voltage behaves over time. It cannot show ringing on a…
The RIGOL DG6000 series is positioned as the company’s flagship function and arbitrary waveform generator platform, combining up to 1 GHz analog bandwidth, 2.5 GSa/s sample rate, 16-bit vertical resolution, 2- or 4-channel output, and fully isolated channels in one instrument family. RIGOL also states that the series is built…
Choosing a spectrum analyzer in 2026 is no longer a simple purchasing decision based on frequency range and price. A decade ago, many engineers and technicians could make a decent buying choice by checking the maximum frequency, comparing a few common specifications, and selecting a model that fit their budget….
RF measurement equipment has evolved rapidly in recent years. Modern wireless systems, IoT devices, microwave communication links and increasingly crowded radio spectra require measurement tools capable of detecting fast and short-lived RF events. The Rigol RSA6000 series is a spectrum analyzer platform that combines traditional swept spectrum analysis with real-time…
Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for radio frequency experimentation. What once required laboratory-grade instruments costing thousands of dollars can now be achieved with relatively inexpensive hardware and open-source software. One of the most powerful applications of SDR is building your own spectrum analyzer—a…
If you bought a NanoVNA to “check SWR,” you’re already on the right track—but a NanoVNA can do much more than show a single SWR number. Used correctly, it’s a compact vector network analyzer (VNA) that measures complex impedance versus frequency, plots S11 (reflection) and S21 (transmission), and lets you…