On Tuesday, Feb 6th, Agilent held a 3-hour long seminar all the way out there at Waikele golf club. The talk was about their scopes (digital&mixed-signal), spectrum/vector/fft anaylzers, signal generators, etc. It was not so much so as a marketing talk, but rather some what techie one. They actually covered the block diagram of each general design, pros&cons, and signal theory. The coolest part, for me at least, was all the different types of ADC in their machines. It was eye-openning to see all the tricks they use.
The most important part though, was the free lunch. Hahahahha.. :D I'm pretty sure the reason they had the seminar in Waipahu instead of Honolulu was to weed out the free loaders from UH. But that didn't stop me now - did it? I can see the title of my autobiography: "I'm just here for the free food: A memoir of a grad student " ;)
After lunch, nmh and I stuck around for more questions. At our lab, we have this 2-year-old $25k MSO and I'm pretty much its only user. We never quite figured out how to make the screen "scroll" like normal analog scope (say.. the Tektronix ones). So we asked the guys about that. Two of them spent good 10-15 minutes figured that out on the spot with their demo scope. What impressed me the most was how hard they tried to please the customers. Every question was answered without BSing their way through it. They tried to keep the customers as happy as possible. But of course, when you're in a business that sells a piece of equipment costs as much as a good brand new car, you have every reason to do that!
