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JLNY thanks for the input, it is most valuable. I have been considering new versus used, and personally would prefer going with an analog oscilloscope. Just finding a good one indeed will take time, patience and careful screening. I have worked with Tektronix many years ago on a professional basis and have always been impressed with their quality.
And yes you would do me a favour by giving your recommendations from experience.
Hi I recently bought an Owon VDS1022 and so far am very pleased with it, one thing to watch that's not in the spec is it goes into auto mode above 50mS/div and that stops you single shotting slow events. Otherwise the triggering is excellent as I believe it's done in hardware. Although it has two USB plugs on my Laptop it runs happily on one. Noise not bad, Isolation excellent but again using a LT on batteries don't need it. OK you can push it to the risetime limit in some circumstances and it would be no good for debugging very fast data buses (>66Mhz) and it's a bit dodgy on very fast power mosfet switching. I believe streets ahead of the Hantek products that rumor has it are based on the doddery old FX2 USB chip. The Owon has an Sparten XC3S200A and M3U156 32 bit arm processor so a bit more potent on board processing. There's a few other wrinkles when compared with lab type scopes costing thousands but not so significant I can remember them I think there's a review I remember reading out on the web somewhere.Hi, I am looking to buy a oscilloscope and/or logic analyser for hobby purposes. Some analog work, mostly digital and microcontroller projects. What advice would you give?
What about USB scopes, for example **broken link removed**
... I could never go back to the old analog scopes. I tried at work recently to look at the two phases of a stepper motor, only to realize that the CRT type scopes alternate between multiple traces (unless they have a chopper mode), so there was no possible way to see both waveforms at the same exact time...
If anyone cares, this above statement by me is not true. Upon further research, the Instek model is only about 5.5" deep (140mm). The MCM website has the wrong dimensions.Slightly smaller screen and a much deeper box.
B&K 2120B (30MHz) DOES have a chop mode actually, but since I was looking at PWM waveforms from current regulated motor drivers I couldn't get a clean picture of the pulses of the driver outputs. Since these were not repetitive waveforms from a single step of the motor accelerating then stopping, the signals of interest flash on the screen and just as quickly evaporate. If it had phosphor persistence, maybe I could have seen them. I know this is a very specific application, but there are times when a digital scope outshines an analog scope. With the price of them being obtainable from all but the very budget minded, why deal with focusing those blurry beams?What kind of scope was it that it didn't even have a chop mode?
This is very true, and that is probably the main advantage of DSOs over analog scopes. The inability of analog scopes to capture non-repetitive signals is a real issue, especially in digital applications, which is why I specifically mentioned it as a drawback of things like the Tek 2200/2400 scopes.Since these were not repetitive waveforms from a single step of the motor accelerating then stopping, the signals of interest flash on the screen and just as quickly evaporate.