PC Scopes

[arhi]

The key to finding good buys on e-bay is giving it time, you may have to wait a few weeks for good deals to come up.

it is true, but if you live in usa / canada .. if you live on the other side of the pond, in europe, the story is much different as 80% of ppl do not ship over the pond and that 99% of the "good" offers ppl do not want to ship over the pond ..

Those picoscopes look okay, but for the price you can do way better.
Right now the 2202 kit is listed at about 350 dollars, and it's only a 5mhz scope.

200E for 2203 is not that much ... donno what you can find on ebay that "works" for that amount....

The first bench scope on e-bay I found was for 350 was this
**broken link removed**

this one is in the neighbourhood so it would be fesible .. but ...I'd still go for a new thing with guarantee ..

 

[Sceadwian]

So scan only ebay auctions that originate in Europe...

 

[duffy]

Sceadwian - I was replying to Arhi (don't know how I missed your reply). I meant the Picoscope was a hassle to take into the other room, the computer's usually plugged into fifty-thousand different things, even if it's a laptop.

The ADS1022 looks like a thing of beauty and a good recommendation.

 

[Sceadwian]

They sell even more compact handheld scopes, but then the price really gets up there.

 

[BuffaloEngineer]

I looked into PC oscilloscopes for a while, but they aren't necessarily all that cheap, especially from Pico, who looked like they had the best. Once you get close to purchasing, you'll find that the list price for each model is for the cheapest, lowest bandwidth version, but the specs for that model are for the most expensive, highest bandwidth version.

I got the BK Precision 2530 for ~$500 - this is not a good oscilloscope by any measure, but I think it's okay for the money. The second channel doesn't seem to be very stable when used by itself, the PC connection barely works (usually doesn't work at all, when it does work it's pretty cruddy), and a couple times I was getting strange results, and restarted the unit to fix it (which worked....). It is cheap, though, and for just about everything I do, it's good enough. It's 25MHz, which is less than I wanted, but again, it's good enough.

I would agree with most posters - check e-bay and see if the economy shakes out some nice scopes.

 

[be80be]

I got a BK 20 mhz duel channel for $48.50 on ebay. I waited to the last minute and bid till I won it. It works very good all but like you said.

and a couple times I was getting strange results, and restarted the unit to fix it

But for the money I can turn it off and restart it.