The bigger picture: https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/701796809413304320 -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/

I've always eyed the 4952... being as my penchant is HP and much of my test equipment is same-vintage HP gear (I'll give a vote for the 1631D logic analyzer, combo LA and digital scope - the scope is sorta poor, but handy - the LA is great for what I work on). However, I spent a significant portion of my career in front of a serial analyzer so I'm pretty familiar with them. As much as I really WANT the 4952 to be "it", it isn't - for me. Mainly because I have found that having a unfolding or removable (or permanently in the usual spot) keyboard takes up far too much bench space - or is unusable when standing the unit upright (very often it was convenient to set the LA on the floor and on the models I use - the keyboard and screen face straight up). The ones I use these days are a Spectron D101 or D101X (I have them both). See http://ebay.com/itm/262261970901 The one I used for work projects - don't own - and may buy soon... is a Spectron D2000 which for some reason is labeled in this auction as a "Telenex AR Datascope 2000". See http://ebay.com/itm/301859511695 Since either of these have a front panel that is "on the front" and doesn't stick out at all... they seem to work better real-estate-wise sitting on the bench facing towards me, or sitting on the ground on the end - screen/keyboard facing up - so they are more accessible when working on a system. Just my 2 millidollars worth... J

I had written... To which Tony replied.... ---------- Don't you mean 20 millidollars? ---------- I'd have intended to say 2 centidollars... but if I say I meant 20 millidollars then I can claim it was merely a typo and I dropped the 0 *cough* J

Marc wrote.... -------- I was not sure what I would getting that a laptop with a good terminal emulator and a serial port would give me. Can you convince me otherwise? What do you guys use it for? --------- Perhaps there are terminal emulators out there that can do the following, but I'm not aware of any that do these things that are the most common use cases.... 1) Display transmit on one line and receive on the other line, positionally correct. Very easy to visually see what one side sent, and what the other side replied. 2) Display the characters not just in ascii text, but in ascii mnemonics, and better yet... binary, octal, hex. FAR easier to see what is REALLY being transmitted and received. Ex - so if the unit is set to 81N, are the parity bits right? You can tell visually at a glance without really thinking. 3) And given the display can be in binary, it's easy to see field values that do not align on even count positions - ex: 8 bits where the first 3 bits mean something in the protocol, and the next field is 5 bits, etc. 4) Automatically trigger on events - ex. Watch the line until you see this sequence from the DCE. Then insert this string as a reply, wait for this response, then let the DTE continue. Oh, and start logging if this pattern occurs 3 times. 5) Automatically calculate checksums by any one of a designated set of algorithms, and verify the checksums being sent and received. Start logging, up to 2K size, once a checksum mismatch occurs. 6) Run BERT tests to either side. 7) Often provide a breakout box to jumper and/or reroute wires. 8) Save data to a disk for later review, or print to paper. 9) Easily deal with async, sync, bsync, x.25, etc. When writing your own communications protocols, a datascope makes testing/troubleshooting a very quick process. The alternative ... not so much. Many decades ago, I had a program for DOS (that I have since lost) called "Breakout II". It came with a cable and required two serial ports. It was a "software" breakout box. It was sorta handy... but it was no datascope. J

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 8:52 PM, jwsmobile <jws at jwsss.com> wrote: [...] The Saleae Logic Pro 16 (and probably the Logic Pro 8, but I haven't checked) are designed for an operating input voltage range of +/-10V, with an abs max rating of +/-25V. Saleae specifically states that it can be directly connected to RS-232. The Logic Pro models are more expensive than the other (amateur?) models, but support analog input on all channels. I now use a Logic Pro 16 for most of my simple logic analyzer requirements, but still use an Agilent 16700 logic analyzer mainframe when I need more than 16 channels.