Visit to Rigol Electronics

Kenneth Wyatt- August 5, 2012

I had a chance to visit Rigol Electronics' North American headquarters near Cleveland last week and to provide some EMC training to the sales and engineering team. What a great bunch of guys! After the training, I was able to discuss their new DSA815 spectrum analyzer and get a few more details for the upcoming review. We also used it (and their 1 GHz bandwidth oscilloscope) during the demo portion of the training.



Rigol's technical team members (L-R), Steve Barfield (sales manager), Joel Roop (application engineer), Jason Chonko (application engineer) and Chris Armstrong (general manager). It's great to be able to faces to the names for those who call for information or for assistance.

They were quite interested in the EMC applications for the new low-cost ($1,295) analyzer and we agreed the best applications would be pre-compliance testing and EMC troubleshooting. During the training, I was able to demonstrate several typical measurements an EMC engineer would likely be making and the analyzer performed well. One of the more interesting demos for them was the resonance measurement of the cookie tin "cavity", described in an earlier blog posting.

Rigol started out in Beijing with a handful of sharp engineers and introduced a line of low-cost oscilloscopes back in the early 2000s. They've come a long way since then and have also expanded their product line to include low-cost spectrum analyzers, RF generators, arbitrary waveform generators and multimeters.

As a radio amateur, one fun event for me is the annual Dayton Hamvention - the world's largest ham radio convention and flea market. I was able to attend this year and noticed Rigol had a triple-wide booth space there. It was so crowded, I couldn't even get close, but managed to snap a picture. Discussing the event with the guys this last week, they mentioned they'd brought a truckload of products and sold out of the new DSA815 spectrum analyzer within two hours. I can believe it from the crowd I saw and the number of folks walking away with large boxes under arm.



Here's a shot I took at Rigol's booth at the Dayton Hamvention in May this year. It was crowded like this constantly. Note the stack of boxes behind the curtain, as well as the guy holding a box just purchased and sales guy bringing out another.

For a "first look" review, click here. It was a productive visit and I recommend checking out their products. Rigol Electronics may be contacted at www.rigolna.com.