Tektronix MDO4000B Series mixed domain oscilloscope

The MDO4000B Series oscilloscope has a built-in spectrum analyser. This enables the user to continue to use the oscilloscope to investigate frequency domain issues rather than having to find and relearn a spectrum analyser. The product is also able to correlate events in the frequency domain with the time domain phenomena that caused them.

When both the spectrum analyser and any analog or digital channels are on, the oscilloscope display is split into two views. The upper half of the display is a traditional oscilloscope view of the time domain. The lower half of the display is a frequency domain view of the spectrum analyser input. The frequency domain view is not simply an FFT of the analog or digital channels in the instrument, but is the spectrum acquired from the spectrum analyser input.

With traditional oscilloscope FFTs, the user can either get the desired view of the FFT display or the desired view of the other time domain signals of interest, but never both at the same time as traditional oscilloscopes only have a single acquisition system with a single set of user settings. But with the MDO4000B Series, the spectrum analyser has its own acquisition system that is independent, but time-correlated, to the analog and digital channel acquisition systems. This allows each domain to be configured optimally, providing a complete time-correlated system view of all analog, digital and RF signals of interest.