And it's pretty clear that a beginner doesn't need a 30+Ghz high-end scope, for most even the scruffy Rigol DS1054z does perfectly fine. DVMs or scopes, in fact the majority of threads in this forum revolve around cheap beginner's scopes (mostly Rigols) and the various bugs the Chinese B-brand scopes come with as standard. I also disagree that people here are snobbish re. Believe it or not, these things can often be even more important than the best ever RF performance. You can very often get enough relevant information from a device with less than top-end performance, and as a bonus you often get a much more modern instrument that takes less room and comes with conveniences like LAN or even just the ability to store screen shots and data directly to a USB drive. with lots of money for something modern, or for less money having to live with some 30yrs old huge, noisy and power hungry monster with CRT which due to its age alone is likely to die on you any day, where no new spares are available and where many defects pretty much equal a total loss). The simple reason people buy them is that not everyone needs high-end top-notch RF performance, for which you pay one way or the other (i.e.
#EBAY DSA815 SERIES#
This works not only with R&S generators but also with many HP and Agilent generators like the E44xx Series (although the R&S generators are faster due to their dedicated interface while the other generators connect via GPIB).
#EBAY DSA815 GENERATOR#
They also offer some interesting options, like External Generator Control (option B10 on the FSP) which essentially allows to use an external RF generator to be used as Tracking Generator. Another bonus of these R&S analyzers is that they can emulate a lot of the old HP instruments, i.e.
Show me anything from Agilent (or anyone else) back then (2004-2006) in the same price bracket that offered a better performance and went up to 40Ghz. In fact, back then the FSP was one of the best selling R&S SAs, and R&S does sell quite a lot of spectrum analyzers. As to the FSP not being popular, well there seem to be really an awful lot around of them. In my experience, equipment that is sitting in some corner often tends to not get updated, so that's something to pay attention to. You also have to check the firmware level, as there were various improvements in later versions. Maybe the backlights on your units are worn out. Not sure why you say the display is "gloomy", it's a bog standard industrial VGA TFT display made by Toshiba that's in use in a dozen or so other instruments from various manufacturers. They are still better than the Rigol DSA800 Series, though. I'd generally stay away from the older variants unless its really cheap and you can live with its limitations.
#EBAY DSA815 PLUS#
The FSP7 models with FMR7 come with a SATA hard drive and boot noticeably faster (approx 40s), plus they can easily be retrofitted with a bog standard SATA SSD which reduces boot times to less than 30s. The newer generation has an improved RF section, a much faster processor (FMR7 with Pentium-M and 1/1.5GB RAM, although a few early models were sold with FMR6+ with P3 900MHz), and it runs WindowsXP Embedded.
Boot times of these older FSPs are indeed dreadful with the slow standard EIDE hard drive, as is the UI. The old version runs Windows NT, has a very slow processor (usually FMR5/6, i.e. In regards to the FSP, there are two variants: the older one () and the later one (). Like with many R&S gear you have to careful with what model you have exactly. Sounds like you have the older generation FSPs then.