Rohde & Schwarz has released the R&S MXO-K333, a software option that adds three-phase power analysis to its MXO series oscilloscopes and keeps the captured voltage and current waveforms visible while the measurements run. The company frames it as bringing "power analyzer-style insights" to a scope, aimed at testing and debugging three-phase systems, drives and inverters.
Setup runs through a guided wizard that assigns oscilloscope channels to the voltage and current probes and verifies the wiring. It handles two-wire, three-wire and four-wire connections, covering the 2V2A, 3V3A and 3VN3A configurations. Once configured, the software calculates RMS values, power factor, active power, reactive power and total power on a cycle-by-cycle basis, and it will compute three-phase efficiency once the user defines the input and output configuration.
What separates this from a dedicated power analyzer is that the numbers and the underlying signals stay in one instrument. Engineers who need to trace a power factor anomaly back to the switching event that produced it will care about that, since the usual alternative is reading values on one box while hunting for the transient on another. Advanced triggering, FFT, automated measurements, track functions and protocol decoding stay available alongside the power results, as do math, spectrum analysis, measurement tracking and zone trigger.
Beyond the core power values, the option adds a phasor display and harmonic analysis, with THD measurements referenced to IEC 61000-3-2 and MIL-STD-1399. Pairing a commercial harmonic emissions standard with a military power standard covers both sides of the three-phase test audience, grid-connected equipment on one hand and defense systems on the other.
The software is available now for all four and eight channel models across the MXO 3, MXO 4, MXO 5 and 5C, which puts the same capability on the entry-level scopes rather than reserving it for the larger platforms. Rohde & Schwarz did not disclose pricing for the option.
